Just when you thought the period of time between the moment you mail that dossier off to Beijing and the moment you say, "Hello, small person. Welcome to my family!" couldn't possibly get any longer - pushing twice as long as a pregnancy of the biological variety - it is.

So says Brian Stuy. His argument is that families from here (and there, and everywhere) are applying to the China Center of Adoption Affairs (CCAA) at a steady (huge) rate, while fewer children are being put into the international adoption program - more prosperity means fewer abandonments and more domestic adoptions within China. As usual, the most interesting material is in the comments to that blog entry - lots of backing and forthing over what the facts really are and what they really mean.

Whatever you think of the various flavors of data analysis (and attendant conclusions), there's no getting around the fact that wait times have been steadily increasing for quite a while now. And the brutal math has been noted on Rumor Queen as well, and (in a more wildly scary theoretical way) by the commenters thereon. The speculation that the Chinese government is "keeping their girls" to correct the gender imbalance in the general population seems a little loopy (which isn't to say it's impossible) - but there's also the extrapolation on the current rate of referrals (which I suppose is consistent enough) that leads to the conclusion that people submitting paperwork now could quite possibly be waiting EIGHT YEARS to see their first referral photo. As in: "Hello, small person! I'm nearly a decade older than I was when we started out!"

On the other hand, the Rumor Queen is also reporting that for some agencies, the wait is significantly shorter. I think this matches up with my experience - my limited experience, I should say. The CCAA always did seem to try to do whole agencies at a time, and certain agencies had better guangxi (you do remember guangxi, don't you? ) than others, so there was a double advantage to using a smaller, long-running agency.

Gosh, this timing business has gotten complicated. It's almost enough to make one start overlooking the reality of the small persons involved in the middle....