Current Wait Time

The June batch of referrals came in late last week. I"m not sure if I said this before or not, but China only sends out referrals once per month, generally around the beginning of the month. The batch of referrals that just came in had a wait time of 19 months. That is the wait time from your LID date which for us was April 11. For the past few months, a month of wait has been added on. That is because for quite awhile now they have only been doing one week of each month, each month. I hope that makes sense. So it looks like it will take 3 more months just to get through the last 3 weeks of November 2005. Once they get to 2006, we are praying that the time will speed up or at least remain static because 2006 had fewer dossiers logged in in 2006 than 2005. However, we are also guessing that it will then lengthen because of the rush in 2007 to get in before the requirements changing effective May 1, 2007. Only time will tell. Those are our best guesses.

In Translation

Well it was a quite Mother's Day around here. Nothing special occured. I did however get an update from our agency today. Our dossier is currently in translation. That means the Chinese government are translating all of our documents before they can move into the Review Room which is where they review all of our documents to make sure we have everything needed and that it is all in order. It is also where they sometimes ask questions. We could stay in that room for months.

Log In Date (LID)

We are officially LID April 11, 2007! Yippee! That means the CCAA has officially logged our dossier into their system. It only took them 2.5 weeks. We beat the May 1 deadline by just 2.5 weeks as well. That was just a bit too close for comfort for me. Now we just wait and wait and wait : ) The last batch of referrals that came in this month took 17 months. It is only getting longer each month.

Dossier To China (DTC)

Today we are officially DTC!! We now move into the waiting stage which is currently 16 months. That would put us at meeting our new daughter in July 2008 (right before the Olympics start) if the current wait time frame does not change. However, for the past few months, it has only been getting longer. Please keep our family in your prayers that that does not continue. It took us just over 4 months to get our dossier completed and submitted. Many items were expedited in order to meet the May 1 change of requirements deadline. Our next step is to be logged in (LID) in China. It could be 6 weeks before we know our log in date but hopefully it will be before May 1.

Dossier Sent to Agency

Last week on Friday I sent our dossier to the courier in Chicago so she could take our documents to the Chinese Consulate (just to be on the safe side). I over-nighted them. She called me Monday to say I forgot my birth certificate! UGH! So another $20 to over-night that to her and another $20 to pay for expedited service on the birth certificate so that it was done at the same time as my other 13 documents. Boy am I glad we had very few documents to get certified and authenticated! She over-nighted them back to me yesterday so I received them this am. I had to make copies of everything for the agency and sent that over-night today to our agency. If they received them by 10 am tomorrow, then they would be reviewed and sent to China on Friday! YIPPEE!! Please keep praying that this finishes smoothly for us. I sure hope I didn't forget to send the agency anything. We are 3 weeks ahead of our schedule so we have a little bit of time if something I sent has an error in it. Hopefully it won't as I sent everything over to them to be pre-approved before I had it certified.

I-171H

We received our I-171H today! YEAH! It has been exactly 4 weeks since our fingerprint appointment. It came much quicker than we had expected! I'm so excited!! And Pete is not here to celebrate with me : ) He has been in China/South Korea for the past two weeks. Oh Well. It will wait until Saturday. So now tomorrow I am off to downtown to get our notorial statement certified so that everything can be mailed to the Chinese Consulate to be authenticated. That takes about 4 business days. Then our dossier can be sent to our agency for final review and then sent off to China to be logged in. We are almost out of this paper chasing phase and into the waiting phase! Please keep our family in your prayers that these last few steps go quickly and smoothly.

Fingerprints

I've updated the Timeline with all our fingerprint appointment information. This may seem unimportant but it is very important. The last step that we need to complete before we can mail off our Dossier to China is our I-600A application. The USCIS won't process that without our fingerprints which can only be down at their office in downtown Detroit on Jefferson avenue. We had heard rumors that we could just show up on a Saturday after 1 pm and they would be slow and would probably just process us. We tried that but it didn't work so we had to wait almost another week until our appointment time. It is times like this that I struggle with my patience. I just keep asking God to get me through it and it is all working out so far. We have 8 weeks left if we are going to make the deadline of getting our Dossier logged in to China prior to the May 1, 2007 date of when the requirements for adoption will change and we will no longer be eligible. I know it is all in God's hands but I sure am trying to help him out : )

Up until this point we haven't wanted to think about what we will do should we not make the log in date. But something in me (could be the Type A personality) today told me to start to have a Plan B. So now in my spare time I am researching other countries. It is not ideal for us, but I am researching Taiwan and Kazakhstan. Both countries are Chinese so we would still be able to adopt a Chinese girl. We would of course have to change agencies which we don't want to do. We have already paid GWCA a lot of money and are happy with their services to date. We would also have to spend more money on a homestudy update as well as a new I600A application. It would also mean more than one travel trip which we didn't want to do either and we both want to travel.