Approved!

This has been an exciting week!  We got word on Monday that our dossier was approved by China!!  It wasn't the official document yet, just an email from our agency saying that they had gotten our "soft LOA" (Letter Of Acceptance) and expected to receive the hard copy within a week or so.  The hard copy is what is needed to file our I800 (the next major paperwork, with USCIS), but the "soft copy" means that the Chinese government has approved us to adopt our son - yeah!

So Monday night we scrambled to finish up the last few forms for our I800 filing.  The way our agency works, we send them all the forms, then when they get the official LOA, they email it to us to sign, scan, email back, then they send the I800 packet to USCIS.  So Tuesday we sent them our packet of I800 paperwork (and a few more big checks!) by priority mail. 

We also found out we were missing some classes for our adoption parent training!  Our adoption agency (CCAI) had told us at the beginning that since Illinois has special training requirements, we couldn't take their online training but had to go through our home study agency.  Our home study provided 1 day of training in Chicago, but said we had to buy some online classes to complete the rest of the 14 hours of required training.  We discussed with our social worker what classes to take and took them last April.  But we didn't realize we still needed to send all our training certificates to CCAI, until they told us they needed those before filing our I800 paperwork.  So we emailed them all our certificates, and they told us we need to take 3 more classes!  They were only 30min each, so we were able to finish them Thursday night and send the certificates Friday- phew!

Then on Thursday we also got an email from our agency with the actual hard copy of the LOA!!  It is a very official looking document, written in both Chinese characters and English, stating that we are officially matched with this child, and asking us to confirm our acceptance of the match.  We signed it and emailed it back yesterday (Friday).  The packet we had emailed also arrived yesterday, so our agency was able to file our I800: that starts the final 9-12 week countdown to our trip!  So we could now be looking at early January!  Yikes - this seems to be accelerating!  ...Reminds me a bit of a certain baby girl that arrived in early September instead of mid October... except this time we do get a bit more advance notice :-)

Our agency mentioned this week that once they got the official LOA, we'd start getting a lot of emails from them - and we got 6 yesterday alone!  So I guess we're getting to crunch time.  I have a feeling these next 2 months are going to fly by!  Not long now until we meet our little boy :-)