Category Archives: The Paperchase

Approved!

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One reason for keeping this adoption journey blog is to be able to update friends and family when we experience successes and setbacks. Today, I have the pleasure of sharing happy news!

Even though we had our biometrics appointment with the USCIS on Friday, I decided to give a call to Our Government at lunchtime today to see if our prints were received and if we were assigned an immigration officer. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, the usual time frame for getting the official Federal Government Two Thumbs Up ™ takes between 60-90 days in total, with the approval coming in about at least a month or so after the appointment.

When I inquired today, a very friendly employee over at USCIS happily informed me that not only had we been assigned an immigration officer, but that they had approved our application for adoption the day we had our fingerprints taken! This is an approval time of less than 24 hours!

So now, we just wait for the official clearance document to submit with our dossier. This is the final little bit of dossier that we need to gather, and then it all gets sealed by the Chinese Consulate.

When the preparation and documentation process is this involved, you have to celebrate every victory. Today is a great day indeed!

 

Today’s Governmental Encounter

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Today, Kathleen and I visited the Application Support Center. No, we didn’t go to Dell customer support. It’s a nondescript unit in a mini-mall in the middle of the suburban shopping parking lot expanse that is the border between Naperville and Aurora. You wouldn’t know that it’s the INS until you’re safely inside the one-way-glass door.

Once inside, we filled out a couple of quick forms and were issued our service numbers, deli counter style. Both of our numbers were then immediately called. Talk about efficiency! At that point, the staff treated us to our second fingerprinting of this whole adoption process.

This fingerprinting is required for the naturalization process of our child. This makes it (once we’re approved and all) so that once we step back on to American soil with our child, he or she will immediately become a U.S. citizen.

The fingerprinting was mostly uneventful, though they did have a little trouble with my left pinky. It’s a little misshapen from a childhood accident. It was slammed in a door when I was three or so, and from the base of the fingernail or so up, it had to be sown back on. Kathleen was suitably horrified by this story, but I thought I had told her before. I guess there’s always more to learn about each other.

The waiting game

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Though we haven’t had too many big updates in the last week or so, we’ve been pulling together the last bits of our dossier.  Hopefully, we’ll be receiving our authenticated Pennsylvania documents from the New York Chinese Consulate sometime this week.  I head to the Secretary of State office on Wednesday morning, and we have our official “Biometrics” appointment this Friday. I’m sure that we’ll have something exciting to report as Our Government records our fingerprints for the second time.  Thank goodness USCIS has a service office in Naperville, so at least we don’t have to schlep downtown for the appointment.

Once the fingerprints are done, then starts our campaign to “get things moving” at the National Benefits Center in MO. Though the official line is that they have 90 days to process our immigration approval from day of acceptance to delivery, it sounds as though a little gentle prodding can change that window to a little over 40 days.

On the home front, we’ve started dismantling what has been our office/stuff-it-all-away room in order to begin creating our child’s room.  We have a long way to go in order to get things set up, but it’s a start.

 

 

Two steps forward, one step back

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For those of you playing along at home, the last few days have felt like a game of Chutes and Ladders.  I spent a good chunk of this week trying to get in touch with a special courier in New York that services adoptive families. As mentioned in previous posts about our dossier prep, our Pennsylvania documents have to be authenticated in New York City at the Chinese Consulate– who also happens to not take mail-in forms. This means that we needed to find a person who’d be willing to stand in line forever at the NY Consulate and hand-deliver our forms to be reviewed– then pick them up a week later and ship them back to us. Continue reading →

An update for fans of The Office

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Monday morning, I woke up to Our Government’s version of a wuphf.

If you don’t get the reference, check out this great video clip below from The Office:

Yes sir, I was greeted at 12:01 AM by both an email and an SMS  from “Do Not Reply” indicating that our big packet-o-immigration papers for Uncle Sam was received and is now comfortably sitting in the National Benefits Center Lockbox. I have no idea what “the lockbox” is, but I do know that it is a magical place that assesses us as appropriate parents and our future child as a good future citizen– and all of this in 90 days or less! (Let’s hope for less!) And just in case I didn’t get my text or email, we’ll get a paper copy of the exactly same thing in 7-10 business days. Hopefully, along with the receipt or a few days after, we’ll get an “invitation” for a biometrics appointment at our local USCIS Office to be fingerprinted a second time for the FBI. You can’t say they aren’t thorough.

In the meantime, I’ll let you all know if I get a Facebook friend request from “Do Not Reply.”

 

The worst job in the world

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Well, I promised stories and I have stories! Today amid a flurry of packing for Brian’s sister’s upcoming wedding, we ran a ton of adoption-related errands. Perhaps the biggest accomplishment for us, however, was getting a packet of reference letters sealed by the Secretary of State’s office downtown. We agreed to be guinea pigs in a new process for our agency which helps streamline the process of sealing and authenticating and cuts down on cost for adoptive families. If it worked, we’ll have helped set a new precedent. If it didn’t, well… we’ll be back to square one on a few forms. I went into the city this morning with a stack of dossier documents, not really knowing how many of them, if any, the State would deem valid. Continue reading →

“Things are going to start happening to me now.”

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Aside from celebrating seven wonderful years of marriage today, we also prepared a ton of paperwork to be (hopefully) sealed by the Secretary of State’s office tomorrow morning. Brian’s running a ton of other dossier documents around in addition to his CCAA physical, and I’m headed downtown to get stuff sealed. Either I’ll have really good news or I’ll be ready for a break. Cross your fingers, say a prayer, and let’s hope that all goes well tomorrow for both of us! In any case, I’m sure I’ll have an interesting story to share with you all.