The whole process

I guess I have been really busy with all the paperwork...I haven't even posted yet this month! 

We attended the required all day Home Study Group on May 18th.  Now we need to complete two hours of reading material and a 2 hour online course and then we will have all the training done.  We have just a few more documents to turn in:  autobiographies, pictures and Sean's birth certificate (which has taken 32 business days, so far, to arrive from Harrisburg!).  Shannon's birth certificate arrived from Minnesota in just days.  Then round 1 of paperwork will be done and our application will be complete ...which sounds so good except... at the Home Study Group we received round 2 of paperwork. 

We hope to be able to schedule or home study soon.  Within 30 days of the home visit we should receive a copy of our approved home study...hopefully by mid-July. 

Then we will file the I-800A form (Application for Determination of Suitability to Adopt a Child from a Convention Country....basically approval from US Immigration and Customs to adopt a child from China).  Once we submit the form we wait to receive notification of when and where to report for our 2nd set of fingerprints.   Sometime between 2-4 months after submitting the I-800A we will receive our approval letter...hopefully in late Sept or early Oct. 

During that 2-4 month wait we will be compiling the 14 necessary documents for our Dossier (the official application that is sent to China).  Each of these documents must be notarized, then certified by the Secretary of State (in Harrisburg, PA) and finally authenticated by the Chinese Embassy in New York.  It makes me terribly nervous to think about these documents traveling all around PA and NY!! 

We hope to be able to submit our Dossier to China in October.  Once it has shipped we should receive notification approximately 2 weeks later that we have been approved by China and logged-in to their system to be matched with a child.  Once a month China updates their database of available special needs children.  We could get lucky and have this date fall just 2 days after we are logged-in, or it could be 29 days after we are logged-in.  Our program coordinator will stay up until the middle of the night on the day the list is available and look through all the profiles to find the child who is the best match for our family.  She will "lock" that child for our family and we will have 48 hours to review the child's medical and developmental records with the International Adoption doctor at Children's Hospital and then decide if we want to accept that child.  Once we accept a child, we will travel to China in approximately 5-6 months...March/April???

That's the whole process in a nutshell....