Dossier to China

Well, it's offical...our dossier (all required adoption paperwork) is on it's way to China as I type this post! If you read our last post, we went to Austin last week on Tuesday, February 17th to have our I797-C form (US Government approval) certified by the State, then sent everything to Houston to the Chinese Consulate (on Wednesday the 18th) to have them authenticate everything. They received our papers on Thursday and sent them back to us on Friday, in which we got them from UPS on Monday of this past week. We put everything together (ok, really Jaime did) and sent it off to our adoption agency in Austin for them to look over it all. They called on Thursday and said everything looked 'perfect' and was in the China box and they sent it off yesterday, Friday. They said we will receive our 'Log in' Date sometime next week but may not hear back from them as to what the exact date is for another 4 to 6 weeks, but not to worry.

Anyway, this is such a good feeling to have this 'paper chase' part over with and now the real waiting begins! Please just continue praying for us during this process as this will be a long wait but we know in the end our daughter will be more than worth this wait!

I'll post again when we have our official 'log in' date!
Thanks again for all your support and prayers! Ya'll are the best!
~Melissa and Jaime

Day trip to Austin

On Tuesday, we took a road trip to Austin to get our I797-C (US adoption approval form) "certified" by the Texas Secretary of State. We saved ourselves about 7-10 days vs. FedEx-ing and them taking 7 business days to process. So now... all of our paperwork is with the Chinese Consulate in Houston getting "authenticated". We hope to have that back Monday or Tuesday, and then we'll overnight all of our dossier stuff to our agency (Great Wall) in Austin... and maybe... just maybe... our dossier will be headed to China Friday, Feb 27th!!!! Once our dossier is in China, our referral wait time begins... currently 38 months!!! As far as the wait... it will probably get a little longer as China processes the backlog and then hopefully it will speed up... So who knows for sure... It's in God's hands so we won't worry about that.

As far as the trip goes, Abby was in school. We took Avery with us and she was a "little trooper". We spent almost 10 hrs in the car! While we were in Austin we ate at Freebird's (I know there are several in DFW now). We also went to our adoption agency and met most of the staff including the director. It was nice to be able to put names with faces. Everyone was so nice. We'll post again when our dossier leaves for China... hopefully next week!

Moving right along...

Things are still moving slow in China (as far as referrals go). We can't do anything about that but it doesn't seem to be as bad as we indicated in our last post. Time will tell, and until then we'll just keep plugging along. On a brighter note, the US govt seems to be moving quicker on their end. Last summer it was taking 120 days or more for an I800-A approval. Now, the average has dropped to around 58 days! (they've had ours for about 30 days) This means, we should be able to get our dossier to China quicker!!! We went to the US immigration office last week for our fingerprinting and have sent some of our docs to the Texas Secretary of State for "certification". After certification, they go to the Chinese consulate for "authentication" and then into our dossier to be sent to China... Lot's of hoops to jump through but we're keeping busy and that's a good thing!
Thanks for checking in...