The waiting game

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

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

Signed, Sealed, Sealed, Sealed again, and Delivered

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. Continue reading