This is an I800A, or I797, an Application for determination of suitability to adopt a child from a convention county. This would be a most precious piece of paper.  This paper gives us permission to adopt one child of either gender, 0-4 years old, healthy or who may have mild or severe medical needs from the Peoples Republic of China.  Immigration has a 90 day window to do this and ours only took 32 days!!  Yipee!!

I800A fingerprints

We have a receipt date for our I800A request of 7/19/12, but our appointment was not scheduled until today.  

 

We finally got our notices two weeks ago and I have wanted to walk in since then, as sometimes they will let you walk in early to be fingerprinted as long as you have the notice.  Unfortunately, the Atlanta USCIS office has not always let people walk in early, so on the chance that David would arrange his schedule to go down, only to be sent away, we did not try to go early.  

 

We arrived at 11:15 for our 12:00 appointment and had to wait in a line outside to get through Security.  David was not thrilled that he was not allowed to have his cell phone with him, but he did okay without it!!  :)  After the initial line, things moved quickly and we were out by 12:00.  David and I both had to have a couple fingers redone.  The agents were pretty formal, but once David's agent started to tease him about being too tense, my agent yelled across the room to the other agent that his wife was tense too.  They started teasing us both and we all loosened up a bit and were able to get the fingerprints done right. 

 

Now we just wait for the approval.  Could be up to 2 more months to still be in their 90 day window, but they have been getting approved pretty quickly lately, so I would love to get approval in a week or two.  Then all our dossier paperwork will go to get county certified, state certified and then to the Chinese consulate in Houston.  I can't believe we are finally getting close to DTC (Dossier to China.)

Home Study approved!!

What's new?  Well, it feels like a whole lot of nothing, but in fact, a lot of important steps are taking place.  We just received a call that our home study has been approved!!  Yeah!!  It has been done for a while, but we had to wait on my passport and our social worker was then on vacation.  She called about 15 minutes ago and said she is overnighting it to our agency tomorrow morning. 

 

I am actually heading to our agency tomorrow to get a bunch of our documents notarized.  Unfortunately I will probably miss the home study, but I have been told they should be able to notarize it and mail it to me and I should get it next week.  Then I will take all those documents to be county certified, then state certified, then send them all to the Chinese Consulate in Houston.  We already have the Chinese stamp on all of our birth certificates and our marriage license.  Those had to go someplace else, but are back safely.  After we get everything back from Houston, my end of our paperwork for the dossier will be finished and we wait.  

Somewhere in this process, our agency sends our request for I800A off and then in the next few weeks we will get an appointment to go get fingerprinted downtown, sometimes there is a long wait just for the appointment.  Then we wait for them to approve them and send us the approval.  Finally our dossier will be complete, but will still need translated.  

It's hard to know that it is early July and I have done all I can do on my end,  yet it will probably still be late fall before we have a log in date in China.  Still hoping to get a referral by the end of the year.  Only God knows, but we know he is in complete control and will somehow lead us right to our sweet little girl. All we have to do is wait...... and wait!!  :)

quick update

The sweet little girl we inquired about is already being reviewed by another family and there is a waiting list for her file.  It appears she will not be ours, but we are happy that she will not be an orphan for long!!

PS.  In early July I confirmed that this sweet little girl had found her forever family.  I'm so happy for her!!

Inquiring about a special focus little girl

We are inquiring about another little girl on our agency's special focus list.

http://www.chinesechildren.org/WaitingChild/Album_ChildProfile_Details.aspx?ChildID=10399

She has cleft lip/ cleft palate, but has obviously had the lip surgically corrected.  It is also listed that she has developmental delays, so we are interested to know what those are.  She is a little older than we were originally looking at, as she would probably be 4 by the time she came home to us, but we are interested and so we will see what they say.  We will only be allowed to review the file if no one else has inquired about her.  If others have inquired, they will get to review her file first.  Who knows?!?!

Special focus child and a little background

So yesterday we inquired about a special focus child. I never expected to inquire about a child because it means the child has more extensive needs, but I saw a child and wanted to know more. She was right around a year old and did not have a right hand. Her birth family abandoned her at 5 days old. Her history said that she was not yet crawling (not at all unusual for orphan care) and had some developmental delays. We were interested to know what type of developmental delays she had. The good news is that the little girl found her forever family last Friday but the bad news is that she is not ours.

In this journey we will not get a referral for a child until we have a LID. LID is the date our dossier is logged in to China. We have to complete our dossier (a long process that I talked about yesterday), complete our fingerprints and have them approved, have our dossier sent to China and then sometime after that we will have a LID. We are hoping to have a 2012 referral, but it could be sometime early next year. We will wait for a child that matches the special needs we feel we could accommodate in our family. Sometimes it happens right after your LID, sometimes it is many months later .  The good news for these children, but the bad news for us, is that waits are getting longer. Waiting families are more willing to take minor special needs so the good news is that there is less of a wait for these children to get to a forever family, but longer waits for families. The bad news is that children with more extensive needs wait a very long time. Once a child has not been matched and has waited for a certain period of time, they become a special focus child. You can request to review the file of a special focus child at any time in the process.

Recent updates

We have a ton going on in our adoption process, but none of it is that exciting.  I am working like mad on our dossier paperwork.  For those unfamiliar with the international adoption process, the dossier is comprised of all of our birth certificates, marriage license, employment verifications, physicals, vaccination records, budgets, passports and several other things that I am forgetting at the moment.  After I get certified copies of these documents, then they have to go back to the secretary of the state they came from and they have to be authenticated.  Then all the docs have to be sent to a US consulate...... oh and they can't be just any US consulate or the same US Consulate.  Each state is in a different US Consulate region, so Ohio docs have to go to one US Consulate, Georgia docs to another, etc.  And every place you send something charges a small fee (generally $15-$20) plus the cost for sending it certified, receipt requested and sending a return envelope, receipt requested.  Plus for the Consulates, you have to pay for a courier because they can't be mailed.  They have to be walked in, in person.  Then after ALL that, they have to be notarized and approved by the state of GA before our agency then approves them, translates them and sends them to China.  It is incredibly overwhelming, but it is what it is and I am trying to work through it all as quickly as possible.  I understand now why they say the dossier process can take up to 4-6 months.  After we get all our docs through this process, then we apply for our 1-800A, which is the application to adopt a child from a Convention Country.  When that is received and processed, we get our invitation to go downtown ATL and be fingerprinted. WOW, did you get all that? I can't believe that it is starting to make sense to me.  :)

The good news though is that we have had all of our home study appointments and our home study has been tentatively approved, pending the receipt of all the required documents that are part of the dossier.