Adoption 101

So this is everything you NEVER wanted to know about what it takes to adopt a baby! ;-) This is the process when you are going for a child you find on a list. Or a child that finds you! I will post more on the actual paperwork part soon. Which is what we are buried in right now. Please keep praying! I will post specific prayer requests as we have them. Right now it is those fbi clearances, you can read in the next post. AND as this is our first time to go this route, I may not be exactly right on some things. But I think this is how it all goes...

LOI=Letter of Intent- This was our first step. We write a letter to China stating that we want to adopt Jin Cong and that we understand her heart condition and that we promise to always love her and never abandon her etc and so on. During our wait for PA we begin the paperchasing.

PA=Pre Approval. We wait to hear from China stating that they agree to let us move forward with the adoption, meaning we have to turn in our dossier.

The dossier is your life on paper. You have a social worker do your homestudy. Since we have adopted once, we get an update, but so far, I see no difference between our first homestudy and our updated homestudy, though they are telling me an update is cheaper. (not really compared to last time, but that is besides the point) A homestudy is basically EVERYTHING about you. Your past, your present and your future. What your parents were like, what your marriage is like, what your siblings do for a living, etc and so on. I have often said, when I birthed a baby, before they let me take them from the hospital, they just wanted to make sure I had a carseat for the kid. To adopt a child with no home, I must prove myself worthy. And I will gladly do it for our daughters. But it is rather annoying. However, this is the rule and the only way to bring her home, so we work as fast as we possibly can. After our Social Worker is done writing about us, we apply for all these things, get fingerprinted a whole bunch of times, and wait for all the applied things to come back to us. THEN we have a dossier. The agency then translates it all from English to Chinese. Once the dossier is complete we are…

DTC=Dossier to China. China glances over it and we get a LID.

LID-Log in Date. Remember with Sage, the coveted LID? 6/20/05, a date forever etched in our hearts? They look at dossiers in date order. But waiting children are in a different batch I suppose than our dossier was last time?

We wait and we wait and we wait. I think about 3 months?

LOA=Letter of Approval-This means China has read our dossier and approved us to adopt Mavery Jin-Raye. We sign this letter stating YES we still want to adopt her! Wait about 2-3 weeks.

TA=Travel Approval, Our signed LOA goes back to China and we wait for Travel Approval. Our agency requests a CA(Consulate Appointment for us in China)

We get our appointment, we make all our travel plans and we GET MAVREY!
They told me typically it takes about 9 months from start to finish, like a typical pregnancy. Unlike a typical adoption where I could have birthed twice before I held Sage! And those poor mommies waiting now, I think they could literally birth THREE times in their wait. Sigh..

They say the summer Olympics which are in August in CHINA won’t hold things up, but we will see. Last time we had our Dossier done in in 3 months, but I hear some of the paperwork(that is out of our hands) is taking longer. PRAY! Please pray! We want things to go faster than humanly possible. Our daughter waits and we are working as fast as we can!