Our Adoption Story Part II-

The Paper Chase....

There is a lot of paperwork that comes with the decision to adopt. It is affectionately known as the paperchase in adoption circles. The following will give you a general idea of our adoption paperchase.
I registered for an adoption information seminar in the Winter of 2006, but that meeting got snowed out. The agency did not contact us at any point to tell us it was canceled and this cooled our enthusiasm to use their adoption services. I was beyond disappointed. A few weeks later, I was introduced to a woman from a local adoption agency in Cincinnati. We hit it off right away and she graciously answered my endless questions about adoption. A couple months later, in Feb 2006, I attended their adoption information seminar – the first step on our adoption journey.
The next big step came April 2006 when we had our first home visit and our home study paperwork began. Prospective adoptive families must have a social worker visit their home a number of times and write a report called a home study before the family can be approved to adopt. It sounds ominous, but it really wasn’t that bad. We had to have a total of 4 face-to-face visits for our home study. In addition to the home study process, we began gathering a multitude of documents required by our adoption agency, the US government and China. This was an adventure in and of itself, as we needed documents from all over the country. These documents then must be certified by the state of origin and then authenticated by the Chinese consulate or embassy. This process takes the average adopting family about 6 months or more to complete. We went a little faster than that. From the day we had our first home visit to the day our documents went to China was 4 months. We were DTC (dossier to China) on October 14, 2006. What can I say? My forth child was waiting for me and I didn’t want to dawdle over paperwork. Once our documents reached China, they were logged in their system. Our LID (log-in date) was September 1 2006.
Now we were officially enrolled in the University of Patience, Master’s Degree Program. The children and I began to study and research China and China adoption in earnest as we began our long, silent wait. Once your dossier gets to China, there is nothing for you to do to help the process along, and no updates from them as to where your paperwork is in the process. There are three main components of the process in China. The first is Translation – the dozens of documents in each dossier must be translated into Chinese. This takes a couple of months, as you might imagine. Second, documents go to Review. This is where China goes over every piece of paper in your dossier to make sure everything they want to see is there and is it correct. This is the longest part of the process. Finally, the third part of the process is called Matching – where China matches a child in their system to a family approved to adopt.
Psalm 139:9, 10“If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.”
Our adoption adventure continues in our next post, “A Child Waits”.