DTC!

I received a long-awaited email today from Holt:

Dear Jennifer:

CONGRATULATIONS!  YOUR DOSSIER WAS SHIPPED TO BEIJING TODAY!

Your hard work is being rewarded. Officials at the China Center for Children’s Welfare and Adoption (CCCWA) in Beijing will soon begin the process of reviewing your dossier paperwork....

Yay!!!  This is great news....We are finally Dossier to China (DTC)!

On the way....

Today was the first day of my Spring Break and I spent the entire day putting the finishing touches on our dossier.  All of the copies are made and everything has been assembled correctly, at least I hope so!  We are allowed to send a photo album and a letter to our little girl.  Both of these items proved to be very difficult.  How do you write a letter to a child you have never met?  What can I say to ease her fears, to let her know how much we love her, and how excited we are that she is to become a part of our family?  And the photos...which pictures do we send?  How do we showcase our life in pictures so that she will come to "know" us?  What will she want to see?  What will she want to know about our lives?  We spent most of the weekend working on the photo album, finally including pictures of us, our house, her school, her soon to be extended family...I pray that the pictures along with my letter will make their way to her and begin to prepare her for what is to come.

Here is the final result, right before everything went into a rather large FedEx box....next stop - the adoption agency in Oregon and then....off to China!!!

I800a APPROVAL!!!

Exciting news today as we received our approval from USCIS!  This is one of the final documents needed for our dossier...a copy of this letter has to be notarized, certified, and authenticated, but this a HUGE step towards bringing our little girl home!!

Dossier (aka MORE paperwork!)

While I wait on my USCIS approval, I am working on the dossier.  The dossier is the collection of documents that will go to China.  The CCCWA will review the dossier and hopefully issue our official approval.  The dossier includes the homestudy, application letter, birth certificate, divorce decree, medical form, police clearance, certificate of financial status, unmarried letter, and employment letter.  All of these documents have to be notarized correctly (which is way harder than you'd ever think), county certified, certified at the Secretary of States office, and then finally authenticated at the Chinese Consulate in Houston, Texas.  Essentially, this means alot of stress and worry (and a huge FedEx bill!) and an enormous sense of relief when the documents are finally returned to you with the last stamp of approval!

In addition to these nine documents, the dossier also includes what is called the Prospective Adoptive Parents Form, a copy of my passport, various photographs showing our family and our home, a guardianship letter, and three more letters of reference (thanks to Holly, DeeAnna, and Miss Taylor!)

And the best news of all is that we are almost done!  Just waiting on the approval letter from USCIS and then we will be almost ready to send everything to China!!!

I-800a and Fingerprints

The next step after finishing the homestudy is to file an I-800a application with United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).  This form is used to request permission to bring a child into the United States.  

I mailed my application on Friday, February 8th and received a confirmation text and email on Wednesday, February 13th..."Your USCIS application/petition has been received and routed to the National Benefit Center for processing."  

Then, I had to wait to receive a letter in the mail notifying me of my fingerprint appointment....this makes the FOURTH time I have been fingerprinted for this adoption!  This letter finally arrived on Thursday, March 7th and instructed me to appear in Jacksonville at 10:00 AM on Monday, March 11th.  

So, I left my house this morning at 6:30 AM to drive the three and a half hours to Jacksonville.  I arrived right at 10:00 AM.  When I got there, I was instructed to fill out a form and place the form along with my fingerprint appointment letter in a basket on the desk.  

Before you read any further, you should know that the fingerprint appointment letter is REQUIRED in order to be fingerprinted.  Should you arrive without your letter, they will not do your fingerprints.  

So anyway, I filled out the form and placed the form and my fingerprint appointment letter in the box and sat down.  I barely took my eyes off the box.  The woman in charge came out a bit later and pulled all the papers from the box.  She called a man up who had forgotten to put his address on his form, she called a woman up who had forgotten to put her social security number on her form, and with each time, she was handing paperwork back to these people to correct.  When she got to mine, she announced that she did not have my fingerprint appointment letter.  I cannot tell you the amount of panic that set in in my stomach....I told her that I had placed it in the box.  She matter of factly stated that she did not have it and then stood there and looked at me.  I repeated that I had put it in the box and time kind of stood still for a moment.  I was thinking that I had driven all this way and they had lost my letter in less than five minutes.  Well, about that time, the first man (the one who forgot to put his address on the form) returned his corrected paperwork and with it, returned my fingerprint appointment letter.  She had given it to him by mistake....good grief! 

After that mishap, things went fairly smoothly.  They did my fingerprints and I was back in my car on my way home within a few minutes.  Now to pray for a quick approval!