Less than 2 days until our hearing! We have waited 3 months since our paperwork entered the court system to receive the hearing, so we hope the judge will issue the first ruling quickly. The Taichung foster care program is new for our agency (only one family has completed their adoption since the program opened last December), so the only information we have for reference are the timelines of other adoptive families (from various agencies), posted on their blogs or on Yahoo! Groups. The trend seems to be that some families receive their hearings very quickly, but the judge then takes 1-2 months to issue the first ruling, and that other families wait longer for their hearings (as we have), but receive their first rulings shortly afterward, sometimes even on the same day. Then we have to wait for our final ruling, which generally occurs about a month after the first. Our agency is still estimating that we'll be traveling in July. Two months has never felt like such a long time, but Ryan is worth waiting for!

Meanwhile, we have received Ryan's latest "monthly measurements." At 7 months old, he weighs more than 17 lbs. and is 26 1/2" long. We've also finally started getting his room in order. He will come home to freshly painted sage green walls, an organized closet that we can't wait to fill with little boy clothes, and a big basket full of books that we can't wait to read to him. Every time our cat goes in the room, he goes straight over to the book basket, rubs his head against it and rolls around on the floor for a while, then lays down next to it and takes a nap :-)


We hope it won't be long until we're posting news that we have received our first ruling. Thank you to everyone who has wished us a speedy process!