Adoption Update & News Flash

This news flash will shock many of those who know us well: we have decided to change our daughter's name. When we made the decision to adopt in February of 2005 we chose the name Lily before we became familiar with the Chinese adoption community. We picked Lily because it is a beautiful name and because it is not super popular (ranked number 39 at the time according to the social security office; only one out of every 400 girls had this name) Now after meeting many other adoptive families in person and online I realize that Lily seems to be the absolute most popular name for little girls adopted from China. Because our intention was to give our daughter a name that wasn't one of the most commonly used names we have decided to change it. Also, since this adoption process has morphed into something completely different than we thought it would be, changing our daughter's name seems to fit right in with all of the other unexpected twists and turns.

Our sweet daughter's new name will be Natalie. This was on our short list of names to begin with and Gary and I both love it. It's going to take us awhile to get used to saying Natalie when referring to our daughter after calling her Lily for over 3 years, but it appears that we will have plenty of time to reset our brains to Natalie. Which brings me to part 2 of this adoption post...

As some of you know our LID (log in date) is July 22, 2006. Below is a history of the referrals issued by China since January of 2006. The 2006 numbers were already a decline from 2005 and as you can see 2007 and 2008 are even worse. This month only 3 days were covered by referrals. Next months referrals will begin with January 13, 2006... a little over 6 calendar months away from our LID, but if the current trend holds it will likely be 2 more years before we receive our referral for Natalie. We are fine with waiting as long we eventually get to bring our daughter home.