Call us crazy, and yep, we are old (and grumpy), but what the heck, we might be DTC for Second Daughter on Friday. ("DTC") means "Dossier to China", which means in a few weeks we will get a "Log In Date" (LID) which will be our "official date" for starting the wait. BUT WAIT, you say, Isn't it about a hundred year wait now for adorable Chinese daughters these days? Yes, we are gambling on a wait of around 2 or 3 years. The best we can say is that we are getting in line, and we have plenty of time to come to our senses and, well, simply not renew paperwork and back out. But we'd rather be in line and having this discussion, rather than deciding we do want to adopt, only for it to be totally out of the question. Our DTC "freezes" our ages, So for China, I will always be 40...something.
Everyone has says, "Well, it should be easier now, right?" Wrong! It has even gotten more complicated. There's some new rules, and since our homestudy "expires" each year, we have to start all over. Seems strange when we went with the same agencies, huh? We went back to our old agency, because, hey, we love our social worker and she had been in touch with us for Gracies China reports, and she had the complicated requirements for Homestudy for China down cold.
Here is a very abbreviated version of What You Have to Do for A Homestudy: First of all, pat yourself on the back for never going to jail, or getting a DUI, or going on drugs, and for staying out of trouble during your teen years, because all of it has to be confessed during your background checks during this process. If you don't have any of these troubles in your past, and you are patient and a high tolerance for waiting, you can expect to have ultimate approval of your homestudy, so it all starts by getting fingerprinted. Then you submit request for background clearance in 8 states between us. We then sent and submitted new birth certificates. (China requires "new" birth certificates, issued within the last six months) Got Police letters. Notarized. 25 or so questionnaire, completed separately from each of us, making sure we haven't remarried anyone else, or committed crimes or started down the road to tranquilizers and booze, which you well deserve after all this.... 2 sets of financial statements- one for each agency - local and China. Both Notarized. Copies of 2 years of tax returns. Marriage Certificate. Employment letters. Notarized. Power of attorney forms. 10 hours of Online study and plus 4 test of parenting classes. Copies of everything, passports, insurance cards,social security cards. Medical check up (Notarzied) Letter of application to China --this changed from last time, we had to add wording and delete other things we had included last time (notarized) . Authorization for background checks. Power of attorney forms. Passport photos to include in the Dossier. (Mine was so bad, it drew a gasp if despair from a friend of mine -- my other picture for Gracie was really bad too -- it has no bearing on the lovely daughter outcome, since I think the folks in China matching office use it to measure eye distance and face shape anyway) . Guardianship forms in case you kick the bucket. Submit 5 names for letters of reference. Basically, you are working on two sets of documents. One is for the State Homestudy so we use a local homestudy agency. The other is for China Only agency. Once the local agency gets all your paperwork, you get a home visit and they write up your homestudy. Only then you can proceed to step #2.
On to step #2: Everything put together in a packet, with a new set of immigration forms--similar but different from a few years ago --and gets sent to a new immigration agency in Chicago (not local, which is good, because I think I burned my good will bridges by nagging the local office here last time). Then you wait for a few weeks, you get a couple of official looking letters from the government inviting you to get fingerprinted again for CIS in a few weeks. So we went down to CIS fingerprinting, said hello to some of the staff who fingerprinted us a few times before, went to breakfast, and then we waited, about 25 more days, and the lovely form 797H or something, comes from the government, basically granting you permission to adopt a child from China, then this and another pile of docs go to your China agency. (This part was alot quicker than last time - which took around 3 months to complete). China Only agency then sends the whole dossier and get it "authenicated", to make sure your notary (yes Notary) is in good standing and hasn't committed any crimes, and then the Chinese consulate then puts a bunch of stamps on it, (not sure what they are looking for there) and off it goes to China. Where it sits. By the way, you actually never see your China Dossier in its total packaged completed form. Actually, never see your Homestudy either (according to the laws of this state), unless your China Only agency, which is in a different state, shows it to you.
Hang on, it gets better: In China, your dossier stands in line and basically you don't have to update that - except your immigration papers expire every 18 months, but the fingerprints expire in 15 months and the State homestudy expires each YEAR. So while your dossier sits in China, you have to keep the US paperwork alive and current. So, since the wait gets so long, expirations get all mixed up and you are renewing stuff all the time. Because you do need a current approved homestudy to get that immigration paper for your child. And while you wait, you pay; in this state - the homestudy has to be renewed at a cost of over a thousand dollars or so each year. (Yikes!) And every year, you have to re-do, well, everything. Fingerprints, physicals, employment letters, police check.
This summary is really a very brief summary, skipping some of the hassle involved, but here's a sample of a typical ordeal of getting paperwork: When David went to his employer's HR office to get the same letter he got twice before, the new clerk said they did not provide those letters and insisted that they simply will not issue the letter according to the specifications needed by the State. David had to get several people involved and had to make a phone call to this--clerk--saying, that if the letter isn't written, he won't be able to adopt, and after two wrong versions, he finally got the letter we needed for the Dossier and Homestudy. This took a week to get. The clerk was very annoyed by the whole process. Wait until he finds out he needs to do this letter for us, every year while our Dossier is in China. By the way, we started this process around November 1st, when our application was sent to China Only agency and no matter how fast you are, it takes around 7 or 8 months to complete.
But as you can see, our Gracie was well worth it. And, when we got to China, everything went great. So we will keep our expectations low and pain tolerance high, and see if we can wait long enough for daughter 2. So the fun begins (again).
