Shelby's Life and Whatnot

And the News You Didn't Even Know You Were Waiting For!

Well that big news that I alluded to a couple of days ago has come to fruition.

We are adopting from China!

This morning we got a phone call from our agency (heh, I can say "our agency" now!) saying that our application has been approved and we are officially clients. We are working with Chinese Children Adoption International, or CCAI (click the link at your own peril, and be prepared for heartwarming pictures of adoptive families).

Now we are officially embarking on what will probably be a 2 year journey to parenthood. Our next step is to complete a Home Study. Sounds simple, right? A social worker comes to your home and makes sure you don't have exposed electrical outlet wires and knives on the floor. Nope. The home study is a compendium of dozens of documents in addition to the "counseling" portion (which requires 4 visits with the social worker). The home visitation is the easy part. We also have to collect an inordinate amount of paperwork (birth certificates, marriage certificates, I-blink-254-times-a-day certifcate, state fingerprint check, FBI fingerprint check, income statements, medical clearances, and about 5,000 other documents that aren't coming to mind). And of course all of those have to be signed, sealed, and notarized--which would be very convenient given the notary public in the family--BUT, we're not allowed to use a family member as a notary. Serious bummer.

At any rate, we're very excited to get this party started. It's going to take a lot of rushing around and then a lot of waiting.

The process goes like this:
*Sign on with an agency (CHECK!)
*Prepare the "dossier" consisting of a complete home study, all necessary paperwork, and all government paperwork allowing us to adopt a foreign orphan (3-6 months)
*Send dossier off to be translated into Chinese
*Send completed, translated document to China
*Get a "Log In Date" (LID).
*Wait
*Wait
*Wait
*Wait (approximately 18 months)
*Get matched with a child (called a Referral)
*Accept referral
*Wait
*Get travel authorization (anywhere from 2 to 8 weeks)
*Travel to China (2 weeks)
*Bring our daughter home
*Start it all again for kid # 2 (ha ha, just kidding Kevin. Or am I???) ;)

The way adoption in China works is that all adoptions are run out of a central government agency called the China Center of Adoption Affairs (CCAA). CCAA has a big stack of dossiers from future parents and a big stack of "paper-ready" children who have gone through the Chinese legal process releasing them for adoption. They then go through the stack of dossiers and match one with a child. This is a very stable process, but unfortunately it takes a long time. The youngest children are usually 8-12 months old at the time of adoption.

So we're anticipating Baby Girl Hogan (95% of adoptable Chinese children are girls) around Summer 2008. Hooray! I'll be sure to keep you posted.