Awesome news today! Our Dossier is done being certified by the Secretary of State of Minnesota and was sent today to the Chinese Consulate in Chicago! Funny, Jim and I just came back from Chicago :) This process should take about 2 weeks then onto China! We will keep you posted.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Dossier done

Well, where do I begin. We haven't been around much this summer and I have been super busy trying to get all of our dossier paperwork finished which is no small task considering I wasn't home for almost a month. Thank goodness for my lap top and a good file folder.

In July right before we left on vacation I discovered that I would have to get our birth certificates and marriage certificate not only authorized by the Canadian Foreign Affairs Dept but also by the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa as they are Canadian issued documents. Thanks to a fantastic process server that I hired and a lot of help while we were on vacation in Toronto, we were able to get that process completed rather quickly. We then moved on to being fingerprinted again by US Immigration while I continued to gather all the other necessary documents.

On this past Wednesday I sent in all the dossier documents, ten in all, to our agency and we also received our formal approval of our USCIS "application for determination of Suitability to Adopt a Child from a Hague Convention Country" It was a fantastic day!

This posting has taken me about a week to finish. I have been struggling with if and how I should post the following information. I realize that someone who hasn't gone through this whole process doesn't really understand, nor could they, what it is like to wait "forever" for your child and the pain and anguish that goes along with having one process halted and having to start over again. I feel that the blog is a way to let people in on our process and to play a small part as an advocate for adoption. I haven't told too many people the following story as it is really hard to talk about, and apparently type about. I need a tissue! During the initial time when our Ethiopia adoption fell apart, Jim came home and said that there was a little girl from Haiti that was in the United States for surgery and was available for adoption. She had several medical issues and was being fostered by a family in Minnesota. We agonized over our decision, but, decided in the end for several reasons, which I won't go into at this time, that it wasn't right for our family. The foster family that she was with was fantastic but they stated that their calling was to help her but not adopt her. They believed that there was a family out there for her, it just wasn't us. I was showing my Mom and Dad the blog that the foster mother does on the same day that we received our immigration approval and our dossier was completed. Low and behold they found that they couldn't let the little girl go and have decided to adopt her and make her a permanent part of their family. Jim and I were elated. It was something I had known all along, that she belonged with them! Sometimes it pays to follow your heart. It gave the both of us such peace of mind knowing that we had made the right decision. I will stop ranting now and move on. The blog is a nice way to vent off some emotions without having to talk to anyone. I will keep you all updated as we move forward. We are off to the State Fair tomorrow!