A rare, all technical, no emotion post. :)

I just wanted to update a little bit on where we currently are in the process of adopting our little one. It may be a little bit boring, but we've had a lot of questions about where we are recently, so I felt like I should take the time to explain.We started in May with an application to our agency for their China Special Needs Program and we completed all our notarized contracts in June. So mid June is when we officially started gathering documents and paper chasing actually began. Our agency required us to complete all of our education courses and fill out all of the home study paper work before having actual home visits. Home study paperwork is very detailed and was a 2 page checklist of documents needing completed. I can share that with anyone who is interested.

During the time that we worked on home study paperwork, we also gathered documents for our dossier. The dossier is basically notarized, state certified original copies of documents that verify we are who we say we are. Birth and marriage certificates, psychologist letters, employment/income verifications, medical letters, criminal checks, etc. These documents must be no more than 6 months old when the dossier gets authenticated and translated. The dossier is what goes to China, for us to be approved to adopt a child there. Besides for the documents I listed, the dossier also includes an approved home study and an approved immigration letter.

In order to get the immigration approval letter, we have to apply for it, and to apply, we must send them an approved copy of our home study. So you can see that the home study is crucial to everything!

In our specific situation, our home study (for reasons out of our control) is taking an especially long time to get to us. It is approved, but we still have not received our copies. Since we can't apply for immigration without it, there started be a concern that we would not get our immigration approval in time to get the entire dossier translated before some of our documents started to expire. (Since we started in June, and they only last 6 months, they will start expiring mid December). Our entire dossier is complete, besides for the immigration approval.

So... where we are at... Our case worker had us go ahead and mail in the dossier to be authenticated and translated so that those documents won't expire. We *should* receive our approved home study copies within a few days, and we will immediately file our I800-A (our immigration form). As soon as we receive approval, our agency will add it to our dossier and it will be complete! It will then go to China, and we will receive a log in date. And from that point, we just wait to be matched.

We are so happy to be mostly done with our paper work stage. Everything on our end is complete, so we just wait and act as needed, but the major parts are done. And just in time for the holidays!