After slogging through what seems like an endless stack of forms, clearances, and documentation, we have now encountered the holy grail of adoption paperwork for China– the dossier. For the pre-application, application, and home study, we easily racked up over 75 pages of forms, if not more. That pales in comparison to the documentation required for the final packet submitted to the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA). Equal in importance to the contents of the dossier is the multiple levels of certification that prove the documents submitted are authentic and valid.

For Brian and I, the long-distance origin of our relationship hasn’t exactly been an asset as we’ve been compiling our dossier. A few of the basic items we need to submit to the Chinese government include certified original copies of our birth certificates and marriage license in addition to several letters of character reference, financial stability statements, and a formal petition to adopt. But wait! There’s more! In order to make sure that we are really who we say we are, each document must be notarized by the author. For documents completed by us, that’s not too bad. But for our medical forms and various levels of criminal clearance, those issuing the documents must also have them notarized. Confused yet? Get out the flow chart! Next, in order to make sure that the notary who vouched for our signature is actually legitimate, we next send the documents to the Secretary of State that serves each respective notary. They’ll add a raised state seal to each document, indicating that the state is vouching for the notary who is vouching for us. Got it? We’re almost there!

The final stage is sending the notarized, state-sealed documents to the Chinese Consulate that services each respective state (which for us is in New York and Chicago). They’ll authenticate each state seal and add their own Consulate Seal, so when the whole shebang reaches the CCAA, there is no doubt of forgery. We’re very fortunate that we can walk our Illinois documents to the Chinese Consulate in Chicago, but we’ll need to hire a courier for the New York office, which no longer accepts mail-in documents.  Oh, and one final complication? (as if we need any more in this process…) Most of the documents have an expiration date, so everything must be done as close to the time of final submission as possible.

As for where we are in this whole process, I’d label us as “somewhere in the middle.” We have all our Pennsylvania material sealed but not authenticated yet, and many of our other forms ready to be notarized. I’ll be making a trip into the city next week in order to try and get things sealed at the Secretary of State’s office while Brian goes to medical exam #2 (yep, still healthy since the last exam for DCFS two months ago), so stay tuned for certain wacky hijinx. Things are happening fast now, so stay tuned for frequent updates on AWS!