I should have posted this sooner, but our documents were logged into China on 8.25.2010. Doesn’t change anything on our end, but it’s nice to know all those valuable papers arrived safe and sound.
This is what….
4.5 months of paperwork, interviews, medical exams and parenting classes looks like.
Our dossier is on the way to CHINA!
We are happy to announce that our dossier passed inspection from our agency and left for China today! WOO HOO! And the wait begins.
This time around we are in the special medical needs line, which is very different than the non-special needs line that we were in for Nadia. The SN list comes out about once a month with new children available. The list currently has about 1,000 kids on it and the vast majority are boys. This is also very different from when we adopted Nadia and 90-95% of the adoptions were for girls. We want Nadia to stay the oldest, and most of the girls currently on the list are older than her.
With Nadia’s adoption our paperwork was put in line and then we were matched by a person in China with all the other people who had our log-in date. This time around the matcher for our adoption agency will find a child on the SN list that she thinks would be a good fit for our family and contact on us. From there we would send our Letter of Intent (LOI) to China. If they accept that then they will give us Pre-Approval (PA). That generally takes about a week. Once we have that we would be able to make an announcement and show the child’s photo.
The next step after that is is to wait, wait, wait for our Letter of Acceptance (LOA). The LOA can take up to 80 days to arrive. Once we get that from China we will be jumping for joy and waiting on one more hurdle – our Travel Approval (TA).
Once the TA arrives we all apply for Visas and get ready to travel. From the way the timeline is moving today we would be looking at 4 months from Pre-Approval to Travel Approval. When we got Nadia’s referral it was about 7 weeks total from the day we saw her photo until we were on a plane to China. And I thought that 7 weeks was the longest of my life. 4 months is going to feel like an eternity, but God is good and we know that it will all work out as it should. And just to make sure no one misunderstands, that four months doesn’t start until we are matched with a child. A girl who is a fit for our family could be available for us as soon as next month or not until next year; we really don’t know.
I really hope that helped those of you who have asked about the differences in Nadia’s adoption and this one.
Nadia would like to announce…
Well at least she WILL BE one day. We are very happy to announce that we are going to adopt from China again. Here are the basics:
- We hope to have the adoption completed by next summer.
- It will be a girl because we would like Nadia to have a sister.
- We will be applying for a waiting child/special need child.
- What does that mean? We will be accepting a child with a mild to moderate medical need.
- We are nearly finished fulfilling all the requirements and gathering all the documents that the Department of Homeland Security and China need to adopt from China.
- Everything now has to comply with the Hauge Treaty for adoption. So each step has been a little bit different than what we went through with Nadia, but not drastically different.
- We are hoping for a child between 1 and 2 years old.
- Her first name will be Amelie (pronounced AM-uh-lee) and we will keep her Chinese name as her middle name, like we did with Nadia.
- Nadia is very excited, but said that we should name her Vulture instead, so that she can say, “Vulture, where aaaaare you? Come heeere Vulture.”