I-800 Approved!

Today, as I was working in Eliana's room and saw the mailman deliver our mail  I had a good feeling.  So, I went outside and got the mail and sure enough there was mail from the DHS.  It was our I-800/I-800A approvals, a major step towards bringing Eliana home!

These approvals essentailly give us permission to bring Eliana into the U.S. and are the first steps towards obtaining her citizenship.  Next we have to submit these approvals and some other paperwork to China to get our official travel invitation.  Once we get that we can finally make our travel plans to bring her home.  Now we just have to wait for one more document (a formality now that we have the I-800 approvals) before we can send this next paperwork submission!

We're getting closer!  Good thing we bought the paint for her room today, she'll be home soon!

Chinese for dinner and some encouraging news!

In "celebration" of the one year anniversay of our login date we will be having Chinese for dinner tonight. This will become a yearly tradition, but hopefully next year will include one more member of our family. Speaking of which, we are currently in the process of updating our I-800a which is the approval form by INS to bring a foreign adopted child into the country. This approval only lasts 18 months so it has to be renewed every 18 months. Part of this process is to update our homestudy which is done by our social worker. So, in meeting with her just recently she said she would be very surprised if we had to do this again. Translation: we should get a special needs referral within the next 18 months! It might even happen sooner (maybe within the next 12 months) as our agency has matched many families with special needs children over the past few months. This is encouraging as the non special needs wait gets longer and longer. We'll just have to wait and see.


Now for the update.

As of 5/13/2010 here's our "non special needs" wait statistics:

Referred through: 4/21/2006
Current wait: 49 months
Projected referral date: 5/13/2013
Projected months remaining to referral: 36

INS approval!

I'm going to start this blog (this is my first ever post to my first ever blog) with some good news! After calling INS yesterday, our assigned officer informed me that she approved our I-800a yesterday and that it was in the mail! This is the second major approval we needed, giving us permission to bring an adopted foreign child into the U.S. The first approval was the home study from the adoption agency (approved in January) and the final will be from CCAA (China Center for Adoption Affairs) whenever they get to it.

The next step is tomorrow when we go to the agency and submit all of our paperwork for the dossier. Assuming they don't find anything wrong (cross your fingers) the dossier is then sent to their HQ for another check, then it gets translated into Chinese, then it goes off for authentication to the Chinese Consulate in the U.S (something like that) and finally off to China. This process will take 4-6 weeks at the end of which our dossier will be logged into CCAA and the waiting can begin. Right now the wait is 36 months but hopefully that will speed up soon.

Anyways, we are very excited to be one step closer to bringing home our daughter.

Will keep posting updates!