Fingerprints!

We received our invitation to be fingerprinted from Homeland Security!! I'm so excited about it!! I think it's so funny that they call it an invitation. None-the-less on January 3rd at noon, we get to get fingerprinted. We have all of our documents authenticated, and now get to have them sealed by the Chinese embassy. I found a document handling company that will take all of our documents to the US Federal government in Washington DC, get them all authenticated there, and then walk them over to the Chinese Embassy, and get them sealed, and then send them back to us!! That is so awesome, and the turn around is a whopping 5 days!!! I'm so happy about that! Once that is done, I can turn everything into my agency for translation and review. Once we receive our ok from immigration (I-797C), and get that form notarized, authenticated and sealed, it all goes to China! I'm hoping that happens by sometime in March. We're a couple of days closer to our little girls!! Today, I found this blog. They are in China getting their little girl right now. I'm so happy for them!! I so can't wait until it's us. We talk about our girls hourly. We discuss names daily. We talk about how old they will be. We talk about the clothes that we'll be able to get them. We talk about the blankets we will make them. Blankets are a big deal in this house. We feel them so much!! They are already such a big, huge part of this family, and we have no idea who they even are. We so can't wait until this time next year, when we will be celebrating Christmas with all of our girls; as it should be.

Authentication

I haven't written for a while. There is a lot of waiting in this process. We finally got all of our documents together! It was so exciting. We received our written home studies in the mail just before Thanksgiving, so I had the whole weekend to figure out the authentication process. We have to have everything notarized locally. Then, we have to send it to the secretary of state of the state the document was notarized in, so that the local notary can be authenticated. Then, we send them to the federal department of state, and they authenticate the seal of the secretary of state, then it can be "sealed" at the Chinese embassy. Oh my! I had documents from 3 states, so I had to send letters, and checks, to 3 Secretaries of State. I'm waiting to get those back now. It should be next week. Then, I can send them I believe to one document handling agency, and they will deliver them to the federal agency, and then to the Chinese Embassy. I don't even want to think about what that is going to cost me. Holy Cow! Those agencies only work with some document handlers, and time is of the essence, because if any of the documents becomes more than 6 months old, they "expire" and you have to start all over! The waits at some of these agencies is up to 90 days. I had no idea.

We also applied to immigration to adopt 2 foreign orphans! So exciting! That application is called the I-800a form. When we are approved, they'll send us an I-797c form, and "invite" us to be fingerprinted for their application. That approval process also takes up to 90 days, but when we get it, we're DONE paper-chasing!! We have to send our I-797c to be "sealed" like our other documents, but that one supposedly goes through the system faster.

I ignorantly thought that we would be finished with all of our paperwork by the year's end, and that we would be logged into China's system (LID) by January. That so isn't going to happen at all, but perhaps by Spring, early Summer? I don't have a clue what to even hope for at this point. There is so much more waiting that has to happen. Even after everything is turned in to our agency, they put it in a book-form, translate everything into Chinese, help us make any corrections that need to be made, and THEN send it off to China. Once it arrives there, it goes to the bottom of the pile for who knows how long until it comes up to the top, and they log us in, and give us a Log In Date (LID). Then, we can be matched to our girls, and we'll travel with-in 9-11 weeks of being matched.

I'm excited for how far we've come, I'm anxious for how far we have yet to go, and I so can't wait to meet my girls.