Holding Pattern

When we were matched with our children, our excitement was dampened by the reality that the Chinese government had no idea that we wanted to adopt these two beautiful children.  That's because we couldn't actually lock the children's files until our dossier had transferred from our old agency to our current agency and that process took six excruciating weeks.  Until then, we were in a holding pattern - matched, but making zero progress towards approval.

Three weeks after we were finally able to lock our children's files, our agency called to let us know of a new policy (or possibly, a previously-unenforced policy) which required that families adopting two children submit a dossier "copy" or "mini dossier" for the second child.  This was such frustrating news to receive.  We had locked both files on the same day, so obviously nothing in our dossier had expired and nothing about our family situation had changed.  No matter how much creating a dossier "copy" to submit for child #2 made zero sense, there was no way around it - China was requiring us to update certain parts of our dossier.

I really almost dropped my head on my desk and cried when I heard this news.  This will end up costing us over $2,000, plus time lost.  We were back in the holding pattern and remain there.Without the mini dossier, China will not approve us to adopt both children.

We are also in a race against time, but in a race where I don't know where the finish line was.  China will use our original dossier to make their decision on approving us to adopt one of our children, but they give us no information about when they'll make that decision.  Meanwhile, they'll reportedly be upset if they don't receive our mini dossier by the time they are reviewing our main dossier.  Do you now understand why I feel like this process is going to make me go mad?

Because of an unfortunate timing issue, five weeks later, we're still weeks away from sending our completed mini dossier to China.  We needed a home study update to approve us for two unrelated children, which is simple enough.  We had planned to do this update at the same time our au pair arrived so that we'd only have to pay for one update.  However, the need for the mini dossier forced us to go ahead with the home study update for the two children a month before our au pair arrived.  We'll have to pay for second update to include our au pair.  But to do a home study update, we needed to have background checks completed again.  This shouldn't have been a big deal because we didn't need to be re-fingerprinted and I had already sent in the requests for Chris and me weeks earlier in anticipation of doing the update after our au pair's August arrival.  When I checked in with our home study agency to verify the statuses of our background checks, I learned that while mine had come back clear, Chris's clearance was still stuck in a "pending" status.  After a week of the two of us calling hounding one of the state's most dysfunctional agencies, his clearance magically came off pending. With the home study update complete, we could finally request U.S. government approval (I-800a Supplement 3), which thankfully came back much quicker than the first time we submitted our I-800a.

I thought I was finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.  We needed to notarize everything and bring to the secretary of state's office for certification (where they "certify" that the notary is legitimate).  I actually woke up giddy the morning I had planned to visit the secretary of state's office.  I had a mailing envelope ready so I could drive from there straight to the post office to mail the packet of mini dossier documents to our adoption agency in Texas. When I got into work, I saw the e-mail from our agency asking about authentication.  My heart dropped.  I had completely forgotten about the need for all the documents to go to the Chinese consulate in Chicago for authentication, where they verify that the secretary of state's certification is indeed legitimate.

By that afternoon my fellow adoptive mom friends on Facebook had pointed me towards a courier in Illinois (also a fellow adoptive mom of two girls from China).  The Chinese consulate no longer allows you to mail documents directly to them.  You must either walk them in yourself or have a courier walk them in.  I was feeling less mad at myself when I learned that I could overnight all the documents to the courier, who could have the authenticated documents to our agency in a matter of days, all of which would put us behind just a week.

I wish the story ended there.  After I mailed the documents to the courier, she called me to say that she didn't think the Chinese consulate was going to accept one of our documents due to how the document was dated.  Sure enough, it was rejected on this technicality.  If I was mad at myself for forgetting about the authentication process, I was even more mad at myself for such a stupid mistake.  We had to redo the document, re-notarize, re-certify and re-mail the document.  Meanwhile, we're still in the holding pattern where my resolve is starting to falter.