Wednesday, 11/2/05:

WE RECEIVED OUR APPROVAL LETTER FROM IMMIGRATION TODAY!!!!!!!!! YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :-)

Can I just tell you how EXCITED we are about this! This is a REALLY big deal.........especially after the problems we ran into about not getting the I-600a filed until October 12, 2005. I spoke with the executive director at our adoption agency today and she thinks our DOSSIER will be ready to go to China in about 2 weeks!!!!!! This really makes me HAPPY......if you can't tell! Now for the next few weeks we have to work on getting our documents county and state certified, then we can take them to the Embassy of the People's Republic of China in Washington, DC to get them ready to go to China! Then all we have to do is wait for a referral...which is the information and picture of a child that they will offer us to adopt! YEAH!!!!!!!!!! Well, gotta go get ready for tomorrow.....it is going to be a paperwork day.......and I am actually looking forward to it! Later!

Update: 10/24/05

(This picture is of the nursery bedding that we bought!!!)

I called the USCIS office today in Baltimore, MD to check on the status of our I-600a application because we received our receipt notice in the mail informing us we could track the process of our application online. Well, that isn't true. The I-600a cannot be tracked online or over the phone. You can only find out what group of I-600a's are being processed at the current time. Right now, they are working on the I-600a's from August 15, 2005 and before. So, since our receipt date was October 12, 2005, if they stay on the same timeline...ours should be done around December 13, 2005. More waiting.......however, that is the name of this game. Paul and I are both a little frustrated with this since it may delay us even further with the whole adoption process, since we have to have the approval letter from INS before we can proceed any further. All of this is happening because our adoption agency, or the girl we were dealing with at the adoption agency, neglected to tell us when to file the I-600a. Now she is no longer with our adoption agency...as a matter of fact, the only person left in the Maryland office with our adoption agency is the social worker. So, when we run into problems or have questions about anything, we have to deal with the executive director of the agency who is down in the southeastern part of Florida via phone and/or email. Anyway......nothing we can do about it now, but wait....and pray that this doesn't cause us to have to re-do alot of our other documents for the Dossier. Oh well.....we'll just keep praying for the day we will finally meet and bring home our son from China!

This is me and my hubby on our wedding day, 8/15/1998! Amazing how even back then, or before then, we had talked about how both of us were interested in adoption to include children in our family one day.....and here we are! The journey began, officially, about a year ago. We began researching the prospect of adoption, met with agents from two different adoption agencies, and eventually decided to go with ARC (Adoption Resource Center) around January 2005. I will write later about the interesting (to put it mildly) experiences we have had thus far in our adoption journey, but this is what we have accomplished so far:
1. Decided we wanted to adopt internationally
2. Decided we wanted to adopt from China
3. Choose our adoption agency, ARC, which is able to be our local and international agency
4. Submitted application, with many supporting documents, to ARC and were approved
5. Began the time consuming process of gathering our documents for our homestudy
6. Met with the social worker, who is wonderful, on four separate occassions to be interviewed as part of the homestudy
7. Had our home inspected by the fire department, and passed
8. Got fingerprinted and received our "Gold Seal" letters of approval
9. Homestudy was approved and we were officially recommended by ARC to adopt an infant boy from China, from newborn to 18 months of age, as young as and as healthy as possible
10. Began gathering our documents for the Dossier, which is the official package that gets sent to the China government for their consideration for us to adopt from their country
11. Found out that we should have filed our I-600a a LONG TIME ago....like before the homestudy........at the immigration office. After getting all of that straight, we filed the application at the Baltimore office, I got fingerprinted that day and my husband got fingerprinted the next day at the same office.
12. We got another original of our home study sent to USCIS, the immigration office in Baltimore, from the adoption agency.....with the notarized page, ARC license attachement, receipt number from the day I filed the I-600a, and letter attachment explaining my "real" legal name (LONG story...LOL!!!)
13. I received my letter of employment today from my employer and my supervisor was nice enough to go down to our credit union with me, so I got let the notary there witness her signature to have it notarized in Maryland (thanks, KJ!!!!)
14. Basically the main thing we are waiting on now is our approval letter from USCIS to complete our Dossier. Say a few prayers for us that it happens quickly so we don't have to re-do any of our documents for our Dossier.

Well, that is all for this first post. Will write more later! :-)