Items required for the homestudy: adoption application, financial forms, medical exams, birth and marriage certificate, criminal records check, references, and an adoption parent preparation workshop completed. All of these requirements take time and will be completed in the next several months.
January 2006- We complete and mail the adoption application for our adoption agency. Separate from our homestudy, we have to gather items needed for our dossier that will go to China. Many of the items that are needed for the dossier require the same information but usually on a different form. Items needed for our dossier are: homestudy report, letter of interest to adopt to the Chinese government of our interest to adopt, financial forms, medial forms, police clearance, birth and marriage certificate, employer letters, copies of passports, fingerprints taken by US immigration, US immigration form “approval to adopt”, passport photos and photos of home and us. For forms listed above (except the photos), each form must be notarized, then taken to the county level and the notary must be authenticated, then each for must be taken to the state level and the previous signature must be authenticated, then all forms together must go to the Chinese Embassy (our went to Houston) and each form must then be certified by them. At each level, the person authenticating or certifying the form adds another form to it. Obviously, there is no way all of this can be done in a month but we are eager to get as much done as we can as soon as we can because we know the sooner we send in our dossier to China the sooner we will get our little girl. We will work on these forms and the process that the forms go through this month.
February 2006- Our homestudy is completed, YEA!! We now gather all our forms that have been authenticated through the state level and send them to the Chinese Embassy. We received them back certified by the Chinese Embassy in 2 weeks. When we received our forms back, they had beautiful paper with Chinese writing and bright red seals.
March 2006- We still had one form from the US Immigration that we had not received. We received it this month and it must be certified on the state level and by the Chinese Embassy. We do that and then we are ready to build our dossier. Now we make 5 copies of each piece of paper that we now have. We keep 2 full packets; we will take 1 to China with us and one will stay in US in case we need it). The other copies and original we sent to our adoption agency.
April 2006-The original packet is sent to China to be translated and then sent over to the CCAA (China Center of Adoption Affairs) in Beijing. That is our official dossier. We sent this around the first part of April. We both are so relieved to have all that done and mailed off. We receive our Log in date (LID) of April 18, 2006. Our dossier now waits to be reviewed. We are told it should take about a year before we get our referral (We learn later how off that statement is!). Now, our hard work is done….we just have to wait.
Summer of 2006- We prepare a guest room and paint the room for a little girl. You can see pictures of her room in another post. We also learn that the process will take much longer than we were initially told. Apparently, many families are doing the same thing we are, which means that the wait will be longer. The hard part is no one knows how long the wait will be. We just have to be patient.
May 2007- Our fingerprints expire that are important for our immigration form. We go and have our fingerprints taken again at the immigration office and of course, pay the fee again. We will have to complete another application for the immigration form in the next several months too. We cannot let this immigration form “approval to adopt” expire.
June 2007- Our dossier is out of the review room and there are no requests for additional information. That is great! Now we wait again.
August 2007- Time to redo our US immigration form again. We must update our homestudy (even though nothing has changed). This means we must meet again with our social worker, get another physical / medical done, complete financial forms, and get police clearance again. Once the homestudy is updated, we send it in with the completed immigration application and wait for approval (again). The good news is that we get one free renewal so we don’t have to send $$ in again.
September 2007- We receive our new approved US immigration form. Our fingerprints are good until August 2008 and this form will be good until March 2009. We hope we won’t have to update this again. Now we wait again.
December 2008- Well, another year has drawing to a close without our little girl. Our US immigration form will expire in March 2008. At this point, we do know that we will not receive our referral before March and we cannot let this form expire so we will have to redo our fingerprints, update our homestudy again and reapply for this form. We meet again with the social worker, complete another physical exam, complete the financial forms, get police clearance and this time we have to complete a drug test. The drug test sounds easy right? No. We requested for our doctor to do it when we got the physical exam done. It takes 2 weeks to get back the results (which we knew would be negative). To make a long story short, our doctor’s office could not carry out this simple request and after wasting several weeks waiting for results that never came; we went to a lab that does tests like this among other things. We went one day to get our blood drawn and picked up our results the next day. Very simple! Now the homestudy could be completed saying that we are indeed drug free. It will take a couple of months to get through all this paperwork again.
February 2009- We have now had our fingerprints redone and all the paperwork completed to redo the homestudy. With the new updated homestudy, we complete the application form again and send it away with more money. Now we wait for a new US immigration form with new dates.
April 2009- We receive our NEW US immigration form. This form is good through October 2010 and our fingerprints are good until February 2010. We may have to redo our fingerprints again but we feel sure that we will NOT have to redo this US immigration form. Now, we wait again.
August 2009- We feel like we will get our referral by December 2009 or the beginning of 2010.
January 2010- As we welcome in the new year, we know that this is our year. Our fingerprints expire next month so we had our fingerprints redone this month. Now we just wait for our immigration form to be updated with the new fingerprints and sent to us.
March 2010- After a little reminder to the US immigration, we now have our updated immigration form with our most recent fingerprints. We are certain that we will get our referral in May 2010.
May 2010- We received our referral on May 13, 2010 for our little girl. She was born on November 28, 2009 and will be 6 months old this month. She is currently in the Jiangxi Province of China. We hope to travel in early July to get her. We accepted her and sent back our Letter of Acceptance (LOA) to China. We have already applied for and received our Visa's allowing us to travel to China. We now wait for our travel approval (TA) from China. Once we receive that and our adoption appointments are made, we can make actual plans to travel to China and pick up Emma Kate.
May 2010- We received our referral on May 13, 2010 for our little girl. She was born on November 28, 2009 and will be 6 months old this month. She is currently in the Jiangxi Province of China. We hope to travel in early July to get her. We accepted her and sent back our Letter of Acceptance (LOA) to China. We have already applied for and received our Visa's allowing us to travel to China. We now wait for our travel approval (TA) from China. Once we receive that and our adoption appointments are made, we can make actual plans to travel to China and pick up Emma Kate.
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