July 8, 2006

Our meeting with the agency was very helpful. We found out a couple of our documents need to be re-written and notarized. We also went by the Secretary of State's office in Nashville and had Tim's birth certificate authenticated. That saved us a couple of weeks on our wait time, now it goes to Washington, D.C.
We are waiting on our completed home study. Whew! I think we've made some progress. We still have a big mound of paperwork to notarize, certify and authenticate.
Just to give you a glance of what we've had to do so far for our dossier;
Fingerprints (county and INS)
Meetings with Social Worker for home study
Reference letters from friends/family
life stories
Gather financial letters from employers, financial statements, police statements, physician statements, birth certificates, marriage certificates, and letter of petition to adopt. Each of these documents had to be notarized and then.......
everything has to be county certified before going to Montgomery for state certification. After Montgomery, everything gets mailed back to us with the proper seals attached, then they will be sent to the Chinese Consulate in Houston, TX. Houston will inspect the Notary seal, county and state certification and then affix an authentication seal. Let's don't forget each piece of paper has a fee for each seal, $20 per page in Houston and I'm not even sure what the Montgomery fee is.
After weeks/months of processing and waiting, the papers (dossier) will return to us and we will send them to our adoption agency along with copies of our passports and family and home photos. Let's don't forget Tim's birth certificate had to go to Washington since each state has a different Consulate so we'll have to make sure it gets back to us from Washington before we can assemble our completed dossier. Somewhere, somehow everything should come together.
The adoption agency will inspect all documents and if everything looks good, they will send the dossier to China. Once our paperwork arrives in China, the CCAA (China Center of Adoption Affairs) will review our paperwork and if approved, they will "log" us into the system. Then our official wait begins. This "log-in" date is what we are currently striving for. (Another thing to be aware of, all documents must be no more than 6 months old when received by the Consulate, and our very costly fingerprints and background checks will expire in 15 months and will need to be re-taken before we can travel. Lots to think about!)
Please continue to pray for our nation and the current situation in North Korea. Pray for peace and resolution. At this point, anything could happen between the US and China and the relationship between our countries could be at jeopardy.