Status Report

For those keeping track at home, there are only a few hurdles left for our second adoption!

We go tomorrow morning to get fingerprinted by the Department of Homeland Security. This is in order to get our I-171H (in triplicate, leave the puce, and don't check box H-42-63-J-K-L-M-N-O-P) which is the formal government approval to adopt an orphan from overseas. We hope to get that form early next year, and then we only have three steps left. Those are: 1) Certification of all of our documents by the Secretary of State's office in Austin, 2) Authentication of all of our documents by the Chinese Consulate in Houston, and 3) Translation of all of our documents into Chinese. At that point, it all goes off to China.

The soonest we can submit our dossier (the sum total of the documents mentioned above) is March 2, 2006 (1 year after our adoption of Sydney was finalized in China), and we hope to hit that pretty close. Then we wait 6-8 months (or longer, depending on the backlog at the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs) for a referral. Once we get the referral, it will take a month or two to arrange travel.

End result? Hopefully this time next year we will be in transit, or very nearly so!

For those scratching their heads and asking if we didn't do the fingerprinting (as well as so many of the other exact same steps) last time, the answer is "Yes!" And no, our fingerprints have not changed... to my knowledge anyway. Neither have our birth certificates, marriage certificiate, etc, etc, etc. There is, unfortunately, no economy of scale in this adoption process, so we have to do it all over again as if we were complete newbies. Sigh...

I will say that it seems much easier the second time around, largely because we know what to expect. Last time we would clear a hurdle thinking it to be very significant, only to discover that the hardest parts were still to come. This time we have been pacing ourselves and have not been intimidated by the amount of forms, letters, etc. So, if the second time is easier... does that mean the third will be a breeze? Stay tuned...