DTC !!!!!

Today 4-18-08 we are DTC, which means dossier to China. This is a huge milestone. The next step is waiting for our agency, AWAA to match us with our Katie. Our agency receives special needs referrals about every 2-3 months. When the referrals are received and the information is translated they begin the matching process with many factors involved. The single most important thing is when the families dossier was logged into the CCAA. Other factors include what special need(s) the child has and matching him/her with a family who has asked for that special need(s). This is a very big responsibility for our agency. They pray for each child and ask God for guidance in matching the family with their child. So now we wait for Gods perfect timing.

I171H Received!!

Wednesday April 2nd we received our I171H. For those who don't know what this is let me explain. When a family is adopting internationally you must get approval from Homeland Security/ Immigration. Once you have an approved homestudy, meaning the social worker knows every detail of your life, starting from the time you were born until the current, as well as your future plans, checks your finances, your marriage stability, oh and of course your home and all of those living there. At that point you overnight the homestudy to Homeland security and wait for a fingerprint appt. Once you are fingerprinted these go to the FBI for anyone in your home 18 years or older for a criminal clearance. Once those are cleared through the FBI the results are forwarded back to Homeland Security and they will issue the I171H. This approves the family as well as starts the paperwork rolling at the U.S. Consulate in Guanzhou China. So that when we have Katie, and the adoption is final in China, China will issue her a Chinese passport, then we will fly to Guangzhou from whatever province Katie was in. At that point we have major paperwork to do to process her visa to come into the U. S. So this document is crucial in the adoption process for many reasons. So now we wait for our dossier(all adoption paperwork) to be returned to us via prepaid fed ex envelope. At that point we will make copies of the authentication page on each document and fed ex our dossier to AWAA. When they receive our dossier, they do the once over again, as each document was faxed to them as they were completed. They will then fed ex it to the CCAA where it will sit in the special needs pile somewhere waiting for us to be matched with our Katie. When our agency calls us with a match we will send the CCAA a LOI(letter of intent), they will then pull our dossier and begin the approval process. At this time it is taking anywhere from 3-6 months for this approval.