April 21, 2010
Today we received the draft of our homestudy! It looks great, I provided some minor corrections and then our SW should be able to send it onto our agency for approval. We should have this finalized by next week and then we can submit our immigration paperwork. Wahoo!!! And then we wait.. hopefully, only til the middle of June or so. I'd really like to be DTC prior to the end of June... I think its very do-able at this point.
April 19, 2010
We had our last visit with our social worker today... She let us know that our CT clearances are in!! Yay! She's planning to complete the draft this week (hopefully), then we'll review it, CCAI will review it, and then it can be finalized. Then we submit our I800A paperwork to USCIS along with a lovely gigantic fee, and we wait... Hopefully, not too long. Looking to be DTC (dossier to China) before the end of June and it looks like it really might happen!
April 17, 2010
CCAI let us know that our employment letters look good.... so I've now officially gathered ALL the paperwork that I possibly can... the only other pieces needed are our home study, which (thanks to our amazing social worker who is speeding things along so we can get Jack home as soon as possible) will probably be complete by the end of the month and the I-797C from USCIS. I can't believe how quickly we were able to pull things together this time... :)
April 13, 2010
Our agency emailed today to let us know that they've received our Pre-Approval already! After only two days! Amazingly fast! Hopefully, the speed with which this came is a sign of things to come... there are so many little steps along the process, but if each moves as quickly as it can we may very well have Jack home before the end of the year.
We are now thrilled to begin sharing our news with more people... the girls can't wait to tell their friends and teachers. And we finally have permission to share photos... :)
April 12, 2010
I took a stack of papers to get county certified today and will be sending them off to a courier to get them authenticated by NY state and then the Chinese consulate. Normally, we'd wait til closer to the end for this phase, but I am a total worrywart. Some of the Chinese consulates require that the medical documents be less than 6 months old in order to be authenticated... Adam's will hit 6 months on April 22nd. NY currently doesn't have this rule, but the last thing we'd want to do is wait until the end of this paperchase and then find out that NY now won't certify anything older than 6 months... given the wait times at our doctor's office, that would set us back 6 weeks or more to get Adam a new physical. I'm not taking any chances, so off these documents go.
The docs we've sent off are the 2 police clearance reports, 2 medical reports, Adam's birth certificate, and our marriage certificate.
Picked up my employment letter today at work... everything looks good!
We also found out today that our NY and FL child abuse clearances are in... now we're just waiting on CT. Unfortunately, CT tends to be one of the slower states, but hopefully it will be in by the end of the month. These clearances are required for our homestudy to be completed, and our homestudy is required before we can apply with USCIS (immigration) for our I800A - which results (after about 40 days and another round of fingerprints) in a piece of paper called the I-797C which is the final document required for our dossier before it can be sent to China. So right now, these CT clearances are a key part of us being able to bring Jack home as soon as possible... so lets hope they come in sooner rather than later.
April 09, 2010
We headed down to the town clerk to get our first set of documents notarized. After having SO many notary issues with our last adoption, we finally found a notary who met all the requirements we needed... so instead of playing these games again, we headed straight back to her this time around. Nine documents down... four to go!
April 08, 2010
Last night I finished up our Adoption Petition and Financial statement for our dossier. Emailed to CCAI to get their approval before notarizing... thank goodness I did since I had a math error on the Financial Statement.... that's what I get for working on these at 1 in the morning.
I mailed off my Birth Certificate to be authenticated in its state of origin
April 07, 2010
Today we picked up Adam's medical form. I was able to scan them in quickly and email them to CCAI for approval. Everything looks good! This process is so much less stressful knowing that we are getting our agency's seal of approval early in the process, rather than worrying about little errors which might cause us delays later on.
We've also typed up templates of our employment letters and have requested them from both our employers. This was a big hassle last time due to repeated notary issues, but this time, our agency allows us to notarize a copy so this whole process will be SO much easier. We will get the original letters, copy them, add a statement to the back of them which says we state that its a true copy of the original document, then WE sign it and get our signature notarized. This is a huge benefit! Especially for Adam's letter, since we won't have to deal with it being notarized in Florida and then needing to be authenticated in Florida. All these docs can be handled in NY. Yay!
April 02, 2010
CCAI called today to say that our application was approved (not that we were worried, but again, I always think that anytime something must be approved that it can also be disapproved). Now we sign some more paperwork, submit our first fee, and then will get access to the website and the precious 'dossier guide'. :)
March 30, 2010
Today, we submitted our Letter Of Intent (LOI) to our agency. This is a letter which they will sent to China in which we address how we wish to adopt this child and our plans for handling his special need. Writing this letter a second time around is so much easier given that we are experienced with albinism. It was so nice to be able to write about all the services and resources we have in place for Leah and how our son will be able to benefit from them as well.
Once the LOI is sent, we then wait for our pre-approval (PA) which is the first level of China's approval of our adoption. Once we have PA, we will feel comfortable 'going public' with our news, but for now, we're keeping this super-quiet.
