Good news and bad news (for us, mostly bad news): Families on the internet are reporting that today they were notified by their adoption agencies that referrals have arrived for them. It looks like this referral batch includes dossiers with log in dates from July 14 – July 22. Our log in date was July 25. So we missed the cut off by 3 days.

Since batches usually are sent monthly, we shouldn’t expect a referral until an end of September batch is sent out.

The odd thing is that normally a lot of rumors start floating around the internet about a week before the Chinese mail out a batch of referrals. When a batch is sent out, adoption agencies are notified in the United States that referrals are on their way. When the adoption agencies are notified, this information makes its way onto the Internet bulletin boards. This time around, everyone was caught off guard. No one here in the U.S. knew that referrals were on their way. The first thing anyone heard about it was when someone posted on the Internet shortly before 12 PM today (Pacific Time) that they had received a call from their agency that their referral was in the office.