Last weekend we had our last two visits with our social worker. We had to have four face to face meetings with her as part of the process. And for me, each of those meetings sucked. I have never felt so inadequate confident as a parent and person. Our social worker shared valuable information with us scared the crap out of us, some food for thought as we move through the process of bringing our daughter home. The whole process was exhausting and the amount of paperwork we had to gather and complete is not for the faint of heart. But we had to keep our focus on MeiLin and getting her home as quickly as possible. So now we wait for our social worker to write up the homestudy and get it approved. After that she will give us four notarized copies that we will need for the remainder of the process. Yup, we are not done yet, not even close. So for those of you who are new to this process, here is a quick rundown of the steps remaining.
1. Apply for USCIS approval which is the US approval for us to adopt and bring a child into the country. Approval takes about 60 days and includes fingerprints done at about 30 days in.
2. Gather our dossier. What is a dossier? The official definition is "a collection of papers containing detailed information about a particular person or subject (usually a person's record). Basically we are required to collect a series of documents that tells the Chinese government about us, our family, our health, our finances. We have nearly gathered everything in this process except the USCIS approval and our homestudy. Nearly everything needs to be notarized.
3. Get our dossier certified at the state level. This involves the state certifying that the notary who notarized our documents is in fact a notary within the state. This takes about 5 days.
4. Get our dossier certified by the US at the department of state AND
5. Get our dossier authenticated by the Chinese Consulate. The state's stamp of approval isn't enough to validate the document in a foreign country. So, then we have to send our state certified documents to the Chinese consulate here in America so that the Chinese consulate can verify the validity of our state's stamp! Crazy, right? Steps 4 and 5 will happen at the same time as we will send our dossier to a courier in Washington DC who will walk our documents into the Department of State to get them certified, go back and pick them up, then walk them to the Chinese Consulate for authentication and go back and pick them up. This probably takes up to five days.
6. Dossier to China. After all the certifications and authentications our dossier goes to our agency who then sends it to China.
7. LID - log in date. This is the date our paperwork is logged into the system in China.
8. LOA - letter of acceptance. This is the offical approval for us to complete our adoption from China. We have received preliminary approval, but now they confirm everything we originally submitted and give us "real" approval. The wait for LOA can be as little as 30 days to more than 100 days.
9. See #1 above. Now we have to apply with USCIS to bring our specific child into the country. Takes about 2-3 weeks.
10. NVC cable or national visa center cable is issued when the NVC uploads the approval. 2 weeks.
11. Receive article 5 which is the consulate pre-approving your child for an immigrant visa. 2-3 weeks.
12. TA - travel approval takes about 2-4 weeks. Then we can make travel arrangements for within the next month.
Phew, that was exhausting just writing it out. I will probably revise this list somewhat, but I wanted to get a quick snapshot of the process on the blog so people can see what is still ahead of us. If you see my eye twitching...you know why.
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