Paper Chase

The post office is starting to feel like my home away from home.  

It all started at the end of December, when I went to mail out our official adoption application, and it has only snowballed from there: notarized adoption agency contracts, our thick home-study application, passport renewals, requests for personal references, written requests for certified copies of our birth certificates and our marriage license from the three different states they came from, more requests to multiple secretaries of state to get those documents authenticated, child abuse clearances from every state we’ve lived in since the age of 18 (which for me is five states!), as well as substantial amounts of money going out in every which direction, because most of these requests cost something.

On any given day, my desk is in shambles, full of envelopes, photocopies, checklists, notarized documents, and personal checks. 

In the midst of this, Chris and I have also been diligently chipping away at the twenty hours of adoption education that’s required by our adoption agency and home-study agency.  We just finished the last of it this past weekend and it feels great to be done! 

Tomorrow is our final meeting with our social worker and I’m feeling pretty excited to be finished with this intense home-study process and all of the paperwork and education it has involved.  

February was full of doctors appointments for every member of our family.  China requires that Chris and I both get a full physical, complete with lab work, and they also require the doctor's signature at the bottom of the form to be notarized, which means that we had to bring a notary public to our appointments with us!  Who knew?  Anyhow, I’m grateful that we were able to get seen rather quickly by doctors and get the most intense aspects of this paperwork behind us.  

Once our home-study report is officially written up by our social worker and reviewed by our adoption agency--probably within a week or two from now--we will have the pieces we need to move on to the next part of this tedious process: Immigration.  We will send yet another thick packet of paperwork off to the National Benefits Center, a sect of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which will then ask us for more fingerprints and more money, and eventually grant us permission to bring an adopted foreign child into the United States.  I’m thinking this will take another few weeks.  

At that point, I suspect we’ll have the last few missing pieces of our dossier together and it will be ready to send off to China!  I’m forecasting that we can hopefully complete this paper chase sometime in April?!?

Many of you have asked when we think we’ll be picking up our boy.  It’s hard to say.  I talked with our adoption agency case manager yesterday, and she said that once China receives our dossier, it is about five to seven months later that we’ll be approved to travel and pick up our boy.  Shortly after China receives our dossier, we’ll be given a log-in date, in which we’ll be able to start looking at the large database of children in Chinese orphanages and foster homes waiting for families.  With the Waiting Child program, we could be matched instantly with a child, or we could wait a few months until we find a match based on the specific needs we’ve been approved for.  Our son must be at least ten months younger than Lucy, which could also result in waiting to find a boy that is young enough to meet the agency requirements for our family.  So...we’ll see.

At this point, I feel like I’m nearing the end of my first trimester, and as we approach end of this paper chase, the more this process is starting to feel real.  Each trip to the post office gets us one step closer to our son.  My tummy might not be expanding right now, but my heart is.