Got the last dossier doc!

Thank you to all those who have been praying!  We got our I800A Approval in the mail yesterday!!  This was the last piece we need to submit our dossier.  So I'll take it to work in the morning to get it notarized, then Gabriel will drive it into Chicago to get it certified by the Secretary of State and drop it off at the Chinese Consulate to get it authenticated.  That's a minimum 2-day process, so I'll plan to go in on Wednesday to pick it up and send it by overnight mail to our placing agency in Colorado.  Then they can finalize our dossier and send it to China.  It's now looking like we'll be able to get it over there by early October, before any of our documents expire :-)

Once we get confirmation that our dossier has been "logged in" by the Chinese Government agency in charge of adoptions, we'll need to wait 2-3 months while they review it.  Then once we get their official "Letter of Acceptance", we can file the next form with US immigration (I800) and once we get that back we can go get our son!  Hoping for late winter/early spring.  We haven't gotten any updates from our little guy, so hoping he's doing ok and looking forward to meeting him!

An Announcement!

A lot has happened since my last blog post!  First of all, after a few more delays, we finally received our approved/signed/notarized home study report on 7/30/15, and mailed it the same day to USCIS with our I800A application.  We had our fingerprinting appointment on 8/28/15, so we know our file is being reviewed.  We’re now waiting to get the approved I800A back in the mail.  We’re praying that happens in the next couple weeks, so we can quickly get it notarized + certified + authenticated + mailed to our agency so they can finalize our dossier and send it to China by the beginning of October!  They said it takes up to 2 weeks for China to log in the dossiers they receive, so they won’t send it any later than the beginning of October (since my medical exam expires October 16).  I do have another physical scheduled for October 7 just in case, but I’m really hoping I don’t need to redo the medical form since it was such a long and frustrating process (both for me and for my doctor) to get it done right the 1^st time around.  So please pray with us that USCIS quickly finishes their review and sends us their approval.

But the big news is we have been matched with a child!!!  This came as a big surprise as we didn’t expect a referral until after our dossier was in China.  But the way our agency manages their waiting list is based on the date a family files their Medical Conditions Checklist, not when their dossier is logged in.  We submitted ours in July 2014, so we apparently are now close enough to the top of the list that our name came up when they searched for a family open to the particulars of this child’s file.  This file was also labeled “Special Focus”, which meant it could be matched with a family whose dossier wasn’t logged in yet.

It’s a little boy, just over a year old, with chubby cheeks and a cute smile.  He has club foot, for which he wears special braces on his feet.  There are some unknowns, but after discussing his file with several doctors and adoptive parents, and much discussion and prayer, we decided to say yes!

This reminds me of the 20-week ultrasound during our daughter’s pregnancy: we now know the gender of our next child and a little bit about him, and this whole thing has just become a lot more “real” :-)

So… IT'S A BOY!!   

We are now setting up his bedroom, we have his picture on our refrigerator, and we pray for him every day.  Our daughter is excited to have a little brother, and we talk with her about what it’s going to be like to be a big sister.  Once our dossier is in China, it will be another 4-6 months before we travel.  So IF we can get our dossier logged in by early October, we expect to go pick up our son around February-April 2016!