Paper Chasing

For everyone who wants to know all the little details, this post is for you.  If not, I apologize for the tediousness of this post.  Today began the paper chasing adventure.  I actually was going to start this on Monday, but true to form, I procrastinated on getting started.  So last night I printed off all the forms to get certified copies of our birth certificates and our marriage license, filled them all out, and made copies of our drivers licenses.  Today I went to the bank and got the cashier’s check for the fees related to all of this, and mailed it all off.  We should be receiving all this in the next 3 weeks from SC DHEC.  That’s just the start.  I now have to go get a copy of Rudie’s rabies certificate, and start filling out various other forms, including writing a very detailed biography of ourselves.

We also had our phone orientation visit today with our social worker at the adoption agency.  We went through the process, including a rough estimate of the timeline.  She’s saying it will probably take 12-14 months, but we are still expecting it to be more like 18 months.  We also went through the match process, which I’ll discuss later (it seems like we are forever away from getting to that point).  She also asked us questions about our marriage status (I told her that we haven’t kicked each other to the curb yet, and asked if that counted for anything ;)), and all sorts of questions about prior arrests, traffic violations, any substance use/abuse, current medications, and the list goes on and on.  Our next step is our home study (in which we will go through all of that again in more detail with our social worker), which we are starting next Friday, Sept 7th.

Anyway, back to the list of paperwork we have to assemble into a packet:  it is an insane list.  Of course, as I was thinking about it today, it brought me back to my days in clinical research.  I’m not sure if this is going to require as much paperwork as required in clinical research trials—it sure is close, though.  It actually reminds me of putting together an IRB application.

For those that are interested, here is a list of the required documents we have to put together for our dossier:
1. Desired Child Form
2. Certificate of Income and Property
3. Financial Worksheet
4. Criminal Background Checks
5. Child Abuse and Neglect Clearances
6. Tax Return (first two pages)
7. Pay Check Stubs
8. Letters of Profession
9. Health Insurance Verification
10.Guardian Form
11.NCFA Certificates
12.International Adoption Clinic Certificate
13.Lifeline Children’s Services Education Checklists (we have required readings as well as online education to complete)
14.Medicals (per spouse)
15.Doctor’s Letters (if applicable)
16.Child’s Medical Form
17.Rabies Vaccination Proof (if applicable)
18.Photo ID/Passports (per spouse)
19.Birth Certificate (per spouse)
20.Naturalization Certificate (if applicable)
21.Marriage License
22.Divorce Decrees (if applicable)
23.Autobiographies (you can use the one from your home study)
24.Discussion Questions
25.International Adoption Questions

And here’s the approximate timeline (we’re getting ready to start….step 1!):
1. Home study completed: 3-4 Months
2. 800A application submitted with finalized home study to USCIS
3. Immigration approval received from USCIS (approx.. 2-3 months)
4. Dossier docs certified/authenticated (approx.. 2-3 weeks)
5. Dossier sent to China
6. Log-in date received (LID) from CCCWA (approx.. 3-4 weeks after DTC)
7. Letter of Acceptance (LOA) received from China (approx.. 2-3 months after LID or PA,
whichever is received last)
8. 800 Paperwork submitted to USCIS
9. 800 Provisional approval received (approx. 3 weeks after submission)
10.  Information for visa sent by USCIS to National Visa Center (NVC)
11.  Information for visa cabled to the US Embassy in GZ by the NVC (approx.. 2 weeks after
information sent by NBC to NVC)
12.  Article 5 Letter received (approx.. 2 weeks from cabling)
13.  Article 5 letter couriered to the CCCWA
14.  Travel approval received from CCCWA (approx.. 3-4 weeks from being received by
CCCWA)
15.  Apply for Consulate Appointment
16.  Receive Consulate Appointment (approx.. 2 business days after application)
17.  Travel (approx.. 2 weeks after receiving TA)

At some point, if I can figure out how to add another page/link/or something to our blog, i'll post our specific timeline as to when things happen.  I'm not very computer literate, and actually struggle just doing simple blog posts, so it may be a while (you see these a lot on blogs of families that are going through adoption).

So quite a bit to do—overwhelming, actually.  I’ve already had my meltdown over it, though, and am just going to plow through it all.  I’m going to take it one step at a time:  the only way I can do it without totally going off the deep end  :)