Our Story

We have decided to create this blog so that our family and friends can follow along with and better understand our adoption journey, and so that we will have a journal of our journey that we can share with our daughter one day.

For those who don't know, I have wanted to adopt a baby girl from China for over half my life. When I was in high school I first learned about the "One Child Policy" in China, and how, due to a cultural preference for boys, thousands of beautiful, perfect little girls are abandoned for no reason other than the fact that they are not boys. I decided right then that one day I would be a mother to one of these children. Since Paul and I are currently living in the States, and will be here for at least another 2 -1/2 years, we decided last fall that this would be a good time to start the adoption process.

The process for international adoption is very long and complicated. Later I will post the actual timeline of everything that we have done so far just to get to this point, and we are still at least 2 years (probably more like 3 years) away from getting a referral for our daughter. It has been almost a year since we first made the decision to go ahead and start the process, and we are not even on the "waiting list" yet....

First I would like to explain a little about how the process works, and some of the "adoption lingo". Paul and I are currently finishing up our dossier, which is basically a huge pile of paperwork that has to be collected, including our birth certificates, marriage certificate, proof of employment, proof of financial standing, physicals/proof of good health, police clearance from every State/country we have lived in the past 5 years, etc., etc., etc. Then these papers must all be notarized, then State certified (meaning that the Secretary of State verifies that the notary that certified the official that signed the original document is actually a valid notary. Confused yet?), then all of the paperwork must go to the corresponding Embassy (Wisconsin papers go to the Embassy in Chicago, Florida and Georgia papers go to Houston, and Virginia papers go to D.C.) to be further certified (basically saying that the Secretary of State, who verified the notary, who verified the official who signed the actual document, is actually the valid Secretary of State).

We also had to have a home study. This is when a social worker puts together even more paperwork about us, including verifying our proof of employment, proof of financial standing, proof of good health, etc., as well as fingerprints, police clearances from every State/country we've lived since we were 18 years old, family background information, etc. She also had to meet with us and interview us, both separately and jointly, and she did an inspection of our home. She put all of this information together into an 8-page report.

After the home study is complete, we can proceed to the next step: getting permission from Immigration/Homeland Security to bring an "immigrant" into the country (even though she will be "sworn in" as a citizen of the United States before we leave China, and will become a US citizen the second she touches US soil). This is yet another long, complicated process. We have to send in an application and our home study to the USCIS (Immigration), then wait several weeks, then we will get an appointment to be fingerprinted (again), then wait several more weeks...

Once we get approval from USCIS, we can get the final certification done on all of our documents (the USCIS approval, as well as the dossier documents) by the Embassy in D.C. Then, THEN, we can send everything to China, where it will be translated to Chinese, then sent to the CCAA (the agency that oversees all adoptions in China). Once the CCAA looks over our documents they will log us into the system and we will get a "Log In Date", or LID. Then we sit back for the long wait. The current wait (from LID to the date of getting a referral- the first pictures and information we will receive for our daughter) is about 30 months.

We have asked for a baby, as young as possible, preferably younger than 9 months old at the time of referral. The youngest she might be is 5 or 6 months at the time of referral (that is the amount of time it takes China to get the babies' paperwork together so that they can be adopted internationally), and the oldest is 18 months. Once we get our referral it will still be another 6 to 8 weeks until we will be able to travel to China to bring her home.

Right now we are planning to name our daughter "Caitlin Mei" (Mei means beautiful in Chinese).

SOOOO, while we are very excited and more than ready to fly to China tomorrow to bring our daughter home, it will be quite some time before that day comes. In the mean time we plan to keep ourselves very busy (as we usually do!) so the time will fly and before we know it the day will come!

I hope that this has helped to explain the process a little, and to answer some of the questions you may have. Please let us know if you have any other questions or confusions- we love to talk about it!