Good and Bad News

I have good and bad news. The good news is that our dossier has made it through the critical review at our agency and is currently in translation. The bad news is that, instead of being sent to China immediately after being translated, it will remain at our agency until at least October 7th. The reason is that next week is a public holiday in China and all government offices are shut down from October 1-7. It is frustrating to be at a stand still after months of racing around to gather all of our paperwork, but there is nothing we can do but wait and be glad our dossier made it through the review with no problems.

On Sunday, September 30th, the Chinese will celebrate the Mid-Autumn festival. The day is also known as the Moon Festival, as at that time of the year the moon is at its roundest. The Chinese associate the full moon with family reunion, so it is a time for families to be together. It is similar to Thanksgiving here in America. On Sunday, while most of the country is enjoying family gatherings and reunions, we will be thinking of the hundreds of thousands of orphans there who do not know, and may never know, the love of a family.

http://www.lwbcommunity.org/on-my-own

Of course we will be especially hoping that one little girl will be able to celebrate next year home with her family.

Making progress

I am happy to report that as of today all of our required documents have arrived safely at our adoption agency and our dossier is now complete! This is a big deal for us as we have been working on our dossier since April. Our dossier is a compilation of all adoption related documents required by the People's Republic of China.

To complete our dossier we first had to work through our local adoption agency to complete a home study. To do this we had to provide:

Criminal record checks for every state we have both lived in

medical history forms and physicals for Rob and I

Statement of good health provided by our pediatrician for kids

Child Abuse clearances for every state we have both lived in

we each wrote an autobiography

certified, original birth certificates and marriage certificates

account balances

statement of employment

health insurance coverage statement

pages 1 and 2 of our 1040 for last 2 years

participated in four interviews with our social worker (one individual interview for both Rob and I, one joint interview, one house visit and interview of kids)

4 letters of recommendation

While we waited for our home study to be approved, we continued to gather our necessary dossier documents, which included:

adoption petition

birth and marriage certificates

employment and non-employment verification letters

Financial statement

Physical Exam reports

Police Clearance letters

I-797 (Approved I-800A From) by the USCIS

Home Study Report

3 front-facing Passport Photos, 3 couple only photos, 8 different family life photos

Once our home study was approved, we were able to file our I-800A with the United States Citizen and Immigration Services:

After being fingerprinted, our I-800A was approved and we were issued our I-797:

Then each of the above documents had to go through the process of being notarized and certified by the state in which the document originated,

certified by the US Department of State,

and finally aunthenticated by the Chinese Embassy.

Now that our agency has our completed dossier, they will put it through a "critical review", where it will be looked over 3 more times to make sure everything is correct. If everything looks good, it will be translated into Chinese and mailed via international express mail to China. When that happens, we will be "DTC"(Dossier to China). This is a HUGE milestone in the adoption process and one that I am anxiously anticipating. We have our fingers crossed that they will not find any mistakes on our paperwork, and hopefully I can report sometime in the next 2 weeks that we are finally "DTC", and one step closer to finding our girl.

Welcome!

Welcome to our blog! We are setting this up in order to keep our family and friends updated on our adoption. We also want to provide a journal of memories for our daughter which document the steps of her adoption from the beginning to her arrival in our family. More to come soon!