Home Study Finished!

Our home study is finished!  We can check the first big milestone in the adoption process off our list.  Although there are many more steps ahead of us, finishing the home study feels not only like an accomplishment (even if a small one on an otherwise long road), but like adopting a child is really going to happen. 

The next two steps occur simultaneously - I-800 approval and dossier completion.  We'll get started working on our dossier, which is a set of legal documents we'll send to the Chinese adoption authorities.  Because of the volume of paperwork involved, this process is often referred to in the adoption world as the "paper chase." 

But before our dossier can go to China, we need approval from the United States Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) of our "Application for Determination of Suitability to Adopt a Child from a Convention Country," or the I-800A.  Oh, and before we could mail in our I-800A, we had to wait for copies of our approved home study to arrive from our agency since the home study has to accompany the I-800A.  The timeframe on approval from Immigration is unpredictable, so as recommended, we sent our I-800A the day after we received our home study. You can probably start to see how the adoption process is not simply a checklist of tasks needing to be completed, but really a puzzle of tasks that need to fit together in a certain order with one step contingent upon one or multiple previous steps. 

At least while we wait on the I-800A, we can collect the documents needed for our dossier.  With the government shut-down and the later-than-anticipated completion of our home study, I'm not sure if we'll make my original goal to send our dossier to China by Christmas, but there's no reason to do anything but keep plugging ahead.