What's in a dossier?

In case you are wondering our dossier is the "packet" of documents that we have to send to China. The Chinese officials use this information to determine if they will approve us to adopt. This packet is made up of the following docuents-
Homestudy (we had to provide numerous documents to our homestudy provider in order for this to be completed)
Police Background Checks
Medical Exam Results for both of us
Certified birth certificates and marriage certificates
Letters of employment
Personal Statement saying why we wish to adopt and promising to take care of our daughter
Approval letter from the US
Financial Statement

All of that is then notarized, authenticated by NC, then by the US, then by the Chinese Embassy! After all of that's complete it heads to our adoption agency and then finally to China!

Authentications (UGHHH)

Our approval from the US department of immigration arrived on Saturday, December 26th. That completed all of our documents, or our dossier as it is called. Every document was already notarized. At that point everything (13 documents) had to be authenticated by the NC Secretary of State. You can mail these in (takes about 5 days total) or you can drive them to Raleigh, drop them off by 10am and pick them up by after 4:30. Because of time, we chose to drive them to Raleigh. Thankfully my sister was able to ride with me to Raleigh on Monday, December 28th. Everything went great until we found out 2 of our documents (our police background checks) were not authenticated because the person who signed them had not signed their full-name legibly. Sooooooo frustrating. Kirk was at my parents' house so he called the court house in our county, explained the situation, had them re-do the the reports, asked his secretary to pick them up and put them in our mailbox, and then Kirk drove them back to Raleigh on Tuesday, December 29th!!! He then overnighted them to our courier in DC who delivered them to US Department of State, had them authenticated by them, and then drove them to the Chinese Embassy. The courier will pick the documents up on Tuesday and overnight them to us the same day. We will then overnight them to our adoption agency in Charleston. Hopefully, they will be OK and then will be on their way to China!!!!!

WE HAVE A NAME!

We have finally decided on our daughter's first name......Jia! It is Chinese in origin and means beautiful. The rest of her name will not be decided until we actually get her and understand what she is called and which name(s) she is familiar with. For now she is still Ju Ju at our house because that's what Lillie Mei calls her and we all know Lillie Mei rules the house (at least until Ju Ju comes home)!

PA!

We got the call today that we have pre-approval for our daughter! We will receive a packet in the next day or two with some paperwork we have to complete and return. This is a small, yet necessary, step to bring our daughter home! Now we just need to get our hands on our homestudy!

A Litte More Information and Travel Timeline

As I mentioned earlier, we are not allowed to post pictures of our daughter this time around. I can tell you that her birthday is April 13, 2006 and she is in an orphanage in Beijing. She is very cute (no bias there) and is smiling in most of her pictures. Based on the most recent timelines of families who have recently traveled or who are getting ready to travel, we can hope to travel sometime around June, 2010. Our prayer is that we will be with her on her birthday (April 13th) however, we do realize that God's timing is perfect!

Online Course Complete (for Cindy)!

When we adopted Lillie Mei we had to take an 8 hour class on what to expect, the silly things people would say, etc. This time we had to do 8 hours through an online course. We had 8 weeks from the time we signed-up to complete it--our time is up on October 8th. It had some great information in it but we had already read, heard, or experienced 99% of it so it was slightly boring--OK really boring. I finally managed to get it finished today! Now, if we can get Kirk finished before Thursday!

No Pictures

If you followed our blog last time you know that we immediately posted pictures of Lillie Mei. International adoption continues to be more strictly regulated and we had to sign a confidentiality agreement this time stating that we would not post our daughter's picture on the web until she is legally ours. While this is in the best interest of the children, I so wish you could all see how precious she is! She is almost 3 1/2 years old and lives in Beijing. We are very excited that God has chosen us to be her family! I will try to post a little more about our journey each day.