Australians warned to avoid Bangkok - Yahoo!7 Travel

Australians warned to avoid Bangkok - Yahoo!7 Travel

Uh oh! Not again. There are a couple of Aussie families waiting for their travel dates to go and bring home their child from Thailand who are not going to be happy about the change in situation in the major Thai cities. How scary!

I really hope that the situation calms down soon.

Kim

31 Months Today :)

There's been a lot of action in Australia lately with referrals from Thailand. When I say a lot, I mean 3-4. LOL. That's a lot for our little Thai adoption program.

Just last night, very late, we had a very excited lady post on our Yahoo group about their allocation from Thailand yesterday. They had waited 33 months for their little boy and he is 2 yrs 3 months old. So this timeframe of 31-34 months seems to be the new 'normal'. We're so ok with that!

On the flip side, Victoria seems to have decided not to accept any more applications from parents adopting from any countries, at least for the moment. I would say, and it's just an assumption, that the more media that adoption gets over time, the more people start thinking that it may be a way they want to grow their family too.

As Thailand has given Australia a quota of no more than 42 (or thereabouts) files to be sent there each year, it's a pretty small program with less and less children becoming available for adoption for a variety of reasons. It's bound to hit this sort of slowdown. Years ago when China tightened the requirements for adoptive parents (income, weight, accepted medical conditions etc) a lot of prospective adoptive parents had to do a rethink. That and the extended wait that exists from China now (I believe it's 5 yrs) make the Chinese program less desirable for a lot of people when previously it had been a rather popular program.

So, thankfully we chose the right program for us at a time that was frought with changes! Today marks our 31 months waiting and we've just recently (in November) celebrated our 3rd wedding anniversary.

As much as we want to meet our child just as soon as possible (and there are days when I think I could go a little stir crazy with the waiting) the time has pretty much flown by quickly.

Scott is the picture of patience and rarely expresses any impatience for the wait. He's busy teaching meditation, expanding our vege garden to bursting and of course his 9-5 job too. Recently we've been working on a website for him about Mindfulness Meditation and he's a pretty inspired kind of guy when it comes to his passions.

As for me, I've been slowly working on my website http://www.livinginsmallhouses.com which is starting to show a lot of promise both in the visitors it receives every day and also in the money it generates. The idea of this site was to get it to the point where it was replacing the income we will lose when I'm home with our little one. A nice surprise is that it seems that it will do that and perhaps surpass my expectations!

Anyhow, we're keeping busy while we wait. I think that's been the most important thing to stop us from overthinking this whole adoption process.

Keep your fingers crossed for us ok :)

Kim