Many of you have asked about the timeline for this adoption. I will try to summarize as best I can, I still don't fully understand all of it myself.
The entire process is pretty much divided into two parts, everything you do to get your paperwork to China and then everything that happens after you are matched with a child. For us, we are expecting to send our dossier off to China hopefully in August. After officials in China get it logged into their system, Holt is notified and then we are eligible to be matched. This could take anywhere from a month to six months, but because we are looking at adopting an older child with a special need, most likely it will be on the quicker side. When a child is referred to us, we will receive the complete medical file, photos, and any other information on that child (such as where they have been living, where they were born, etc.) We will have an international adoption doctor review the file and then we have a few days to make a decision on whether or not we will accept that child.
If we do accept the referral, then we submit an official LOI, a letter of intent to adopt. We have to wait for the LOA, letter of approval from China, which can take awhile. There are more steps after that which I will explain when we get closer to that point. All together it is about 6 months from the time we accept a referral until we travel to China. We should be traveling sometime late next spring or early summer.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Moving Along
Things feel like they are starting to come together. For several weeks we waited for the background checks to be completed, and they finally came through. I had spent so much time on paperwork and reading books and things on the internet, my mind was spinning. I needed to take a step back for awhile and just live my life without obsessing about the adoption all day every day! Now we are getting ready for one of the most important parts of the process....the home study.
I have been learning about this whole process of notarization, state certification, and authentication. Most of our documents for our dossier (which is the big batch of paperwork we eventually send to China) have to be notarized, state certified, and authenticated. These are basically just three levels of verifying that we are who we say we are and our documents are valid. Each state has different things it requires from the notary as far as the format they use when signing documents. I didn't realize this initially, so we had to redo some of our papers to get this format correct. We had each gone in for our medical exams and I ended up going back three times to get everything signed just right. I have now started emailing every document to a China dossier specialist in Holt's main Oregon office so she can double check everything and give me feedback. After many changes and efforts to get things to match up on various financial documents, I now have almost all of them ready to go to Lincoln to get state certified. The main thing we are waiting on is the home study to be completed.
We went through our mandatory Parenting in Process class a few weeks ago along with 4 other couples who are adopting through Holt. It was a great experience, just being able to meet them and talk about all the issues relating to adoption. We met our social worker, Bonnie, since she was teaching the class. She is fantastic!
So: home study meetings are all scheduled. Bonnie will come on May 3rd to meet with Chad and I for a few hours. She'll see the house, go over a ton of information with us and try to get a feel for who we are as a couple and what type of child we are open to adopting. Since we are doing a special needs adoption, we have a long list of medical conditions that we need to go through and identify which ones we are open to. We met with an international adoption doctor several weeks ago and he helped us begin this process. We are basically looking at a minor correctable special need of some sort. I will go into more detail in another post. Then, Bonnie will come back on May 10th and meet with us again as well as the kids. I am a little nervous about what the kids might say during this time! You just never know. After that, she will write up the official home study report and come back on May 17th to go over it with us. Then it will be sent to Holt for their review, and once approved, we can include it with the rest of our documents and head to Lincoln for state certification. Whew.
I have been learning about this whole process of notarization, state certification, and authentication. Most of our documents for our dossier (which is the big batch of paperwork we eventually send to China) have to be notarized, state certified, and authenticated. These are basically just three levels of verifying that we are who we say we are and our documents are valid. Each state has different things it requires from the notary as far as the format they use when signing documents. I didn't realize this initially, so we had to redo some of our papers to get this format correct. We had each gone in for our medical exams and I ended up going back three times to get everything signed just right. I have now started emailing every document to a China dossier specialist in Holt's main Oregon office so she can double check everything and give me feedback. After many changes and efforts to get things to match up on various financial documents, I now have almost all of them ready to go to Lincoln to get state certified. The main thing we are waiting on is the home study to be completed.
We went through our mandatory Parenting in Process class a few weeks ago along with 4 other couples who are adopting through Holt. It was a great experience, just being able to meet them and talk about all the issues relating to adoption. We met our social worker, Bonnie, since she was teaching the class. She is fantastic!
So: home study meetings are all scheduled. Bonnie will come on May 3rd to meet with Chad and I for a few hours. She'll see the house, go over a ton of information with us and try to get a feel for who we are as a couple and what type of child we are open to adopting. Since we are doing a special needs adoption, we have a long list of medical conditions that we need to go through and identify which ones we are open to. We met with an international adoption doctor several weeks ago and he helped us begin this process. We are basically looking at a minor correctable special need of some sort. I will go into more detail in another post. Then, Bonnie will come back on May 10th and meet with us again as well as the kids. I am a little nervous about what the kids might say during this time! You just never know. After that, she will write up the official home study report and come back on May 17th to go over it with us. Then it will be sent to Holt for their review, and once approved, we can include it with the rest of our documents and head to Lincoln for state certification. Whew.
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