Ready, Set, Go!

The paperchase has begun! To give you an idea of the shear amount of forms to be filled out and official documents to be aquired, the dossier guide that FTIA gave us is 42 pages long, and that doesn't include what we need to do for our homestudy agency or for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Almost every document has to be notarized, certified by the Secretary of State, and Authenticated by the Vietnamese Consulate, and no record can be issued more than 3 months prior to the authentication, which means we have less than three months to gather everything together and get it to them. Seems like quite a while until you think about the fact that you are depending on government agencies to get you the documents, and more government agencies to certify and return them!

This is the first of three basic stages leading up to us meeting our daughter for the first time. Stage One is this hectic time of gathering documents, having the homestudy done, being fingerprinted (by local police and the FBI), and fullfilling the USCIS requirements to get Advanced Approval for an international adoption (meaning they'll let us bring our daughter into the country and she will become a U.S. citizen).

Stage Two is The Wait. I'm sure that the sudden stop in activity will be hard to adjust to, but I have lots of little projects that need to be done, like painting the downstairs bathroom (goodbye, fire engine red wall), so I'm hoping to use the momentum to get them done. According to FTIA, at this time the average wait for a referral is 9-12 months. However, now that China has tightened their requirements for adoption, a lot of people are switching to Vietnam, which I'm sure could extend the wait. Our coordinator told me that they used to get one or two applications for the Vietnam Program a week, and now they are getting one or two a day.

Stage Three is Referral and Travel! When we reach the head of the line, we will receive the next referral that matches with us and will then decide if we want to accept it or not. Once accepted, the average wait from referral to travel is 60-90 days. Then we fly to Vietnam, meet our daughter, and three weeks later bring her home!

But first things first. Back to filling out forms.