Well I don't know who my daughter is yet, but I do know she already has some cute shoes! Couldn't help myself. I am so excited to have another little girl.
First little dress I bought for Natalie. I am thinking she will look great in this color. I got rid of all of Jenna's clothes up until age 7 since we were sure we were done having kids. Fortunately I have friends who are now saving things for her as well. And of course I will be doing more shopping as soon as I know how big she is!
After 5 months of working on this, our dossier was complete and sent to China on August 10th. As you can see on my table, there were so many copies of everything that I needed serious space to organize it! One complete set of papers was sent to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, which they kept. The originals got sent to China, the agency (Holt) kept a set, and I have a set here at home. Needless to say, when those originals went out by FedEx I held my breath until they were logged in in China.
I have realized that I am an absolutely horrible blogger. I only did this because so many other adoptive families have done it, and I know it will be really nice to have this all documented so we can look back on it and show our daughter someday. I can't believe that I have not written an entry since June! I guess I felt like there was never much to say and just got behind. Well now it feels like a lot has happened so I am ready to get back to it. Once we have a match and know who our daughter is, I am sure I will update all of the time!
To summarize all that has happened: We applied to adopt on March 5th, 2012. For the next 5 months I worked on our dossier (official set of paperwork required by China for adoption) and now for the past 2 months, we have had nothing to do but wait for a referral. When we first began this process, I asked a member of the Holt team to give me an estimate on how long she thought it would take for us to get a match once our dossier had been sent to China. She said about 3 months. That would be about a month from now, and I had it in my head that we would get matched sooner. I don't know why, I guess I was being really optimistic.
About a month ago, I saw a little girl on Holt's website that I fell in love with. Most of the children that are shown on the photo listing are ones that need extra help in finding their forever families. They tend to have medical conditions that are more severe, but not always. This little girl was younger than we had said we wanted. She had just turned 2 and therefore would still be 2 years old by the time we would travel to China to pick her up. After about a week of reviewing her file and thinking and praying about it, we told Holt that we wanted to pursue her. There was also another family that had requested her information from the website and also wanted to pursue her adoption. When this happens, there is a committee who meets and decides which family (there could be several families involved) will get that child. They told us that they would make a decision by the end of the week. My social worker warned me to "guard my heart" since this child may not be matched with us. I thought I was doing that, and I knew that I would trust God no matter what the committee decided. We got a call a few days later that they had chosen the other family for this little girl. I held up for half of the phone conversation but then just started bawling. I guess I had really opened my heart up to her more than I thought, and it was difficult to go from picturing her in our home and in our family to hearing that she would never be ours.
My good friend Maygon gave me a necklace shortly after this, which is a pendant with a saying on it. It says "Faith in God includes faith in His timing."
I love how God provides the love and support that we need, when we need it. My friends and family have been so amazing, always asking us how it is going and praying for us, giving us words of encouragement when we need it, and loving us through it. I am so thankful for every one of them!
This was the final authentication that our dossier documents needed before being sent off to China. Once documents were notarized, state certified, and then certified by the US Department of State, they were brought by a courier to the Chinese Embassy in Washington and each one received this sticker on the back of it. I can't read it but it looks pretty cool.
Well I opened the mail today and we have already received our notice from the USCIS for our fingerprinting appointment! We will go on July 5th to the office in Omaha to have these biometrics done, and should get approval for that by the end of July!
This means the dossier should be in China around the end of August. I cannot wait until the day when it has been mailed out, we will be celebrating somehow!
Well it is now June and it seems like the paperwork is almost coming to an end....for now anyway. We completed our home study in May, and now have all documents ready for our dossier except one. Once the home study was completed, we could file our I-800A form with U.S. Immigration. We will receive an appointment to get fingerprinted (again, yes) by one of their official offices sometime this summer. I am really hoping for June but that is unlikely. Once we do that, we have to wait 3-4 weeks for those to be processed. We should then receive what is called an I-797, an approval from Immigration for us to adopt from overseas.
Yesterday I took all of the notarized documents that we have at this point to the Secretary of State's office at the Capitol Building in Lincoln. They each needed to be state certified, or state sealed. It is the next level of authentication after the notary. Amazingly I was in and out in 10 minutes! Once we get the I-797 form here and notarized, I will go get that state certified and then everything will be ready for the last two authentications. First it all goes to the U.S. Department of State in Virginia, and then to the Chinese Embassy. We have to hire a courier to hand deliver them to those places for us, which was just one more thing I didn't realize and it kind of freaked me out. I did talk to someone who did it and found out that it was a really fast service and they received their documents back in just a few weeks. By my estimation, our dossier should be ready to be sent to China in August or early September.
I have thanked God many times during this adoption process that I am an organized, detailed person. I do NOT know how people do this otherwise! It is so much to keep track of and almost impossible to understand it all. I really think being pregnant for 9 months was way easier than this. Big swollen ankles and all. That was a physical challenge, and this is such a mental and emotional challenge. I know that the day we meet our daughter it will all be worth it. I sure wish it wasn't so far away.
The fun thing is that since our home study is done, we are eligible to be matched with a child at any time. We thought that wouldn't happen until our dossier was logged in in China, and it may not. But it's pretty exciting to think that we could get a call anytime. We actually did get a call from our social worker this week about a little 4 year old girl who had just come into the system and she was totally healthy. Then we found out that our paperwork was not far enough along to be considered for her anyway. It definitely gave us hope though!
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.
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.
