Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Officially DTC (Dossier to China)

Well, here's the start of the third trimester--the paperchase is OVER!! I was notified tonight that my dossier has officially left Seattle and is headed for China.


The next milestone should come within the next 2 weeks give or take a little. If/when China accepts my dossier, I will receive something called a LID (log-in-date). Usually this date is used to assign children to families requesting to adopt. Currently the wait is 12-18 months from LID to get the referral for a child. However, since my child falls in the special needs/waiting child category, my wait will be much shorter. They're saying it will be around 3-5 months, possibly sooner, but don't hold my breath. So it looks like I'm still on track for late summer, early Fall, which is perfect, since school will be in session by the time he comes home and he can get settled into a routine soon after arrival.

Here's something cool that I have not yet written anything about: I found, through a mutual acquaintance, a postdoc fellow at Hopkins who is actually from Xuzhou, which is the city the orphanage is in. He and his wife came over for dinner one night and took home with them the photo album I have prepared for Xiao Tian and the coloring book of basic sign language words, and he captioned all of that for me into Chinese--brought them back to me today! These items will be part of a care package that I will be allowed to send over to Xiao Tian after my LID date. The photo album has pictures of me and Rick, the house, the cars, the dogs and cat, the deaf school he'll be going to, our deaf church, his room, etc. And I'll be sending him some disposable cameras so that he can get pictures of all of his friends and teachers at the deaf school and orphanage. Those will be important when we start putting together his LifeBook later on.

Big day full of big news, between getting the photo album and coloring book back with all the beautiful Chinese captions and getting confirmation that my dossier has finally left the country and is winging its way to the ancient land.

I'm so excited, I'm just beside myself. LID coming up soon, so that'll be the next post.

Friday, June 9, 2006

One Last Piece of Paper

Getting closer. A couple of weeks ago I got word from WACAP that the verification of divorce from VitalCheck was not going to work, because Annapolis would not authenticate it. In Maryland, you have to get an "original" notarized divorce decree by going back to the courthouse it was issued from. So I went and got that the next day and sent it off. They thought it would "only" delay us by about a week or two. (That's a long time when you're waiting on this!)


Yesterday I got word back that Annapolis had authenticated and returned the decree, so it is now on the way to the feds and then the Chinese consulate. They think that I'll be DTC within about a week and a half now.

As one of my friends on an adoption listserve put it, now all I have to do is hurry up and wait!