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! :-)