Paperwork Chase

We went to Bethany Christian Services in Nashville in March 2006 to begin the application process and the start of many forms to begin this adoption. We spent the next 7 months completing our homestudy, our dossier for China, and our immigration forms. A dossier is just a bunch of paperwork about your lives and how qualified you are to parent, such as health forms, income status, copies of birth and marriage certificates,criminal background checks, etc. Never in our lives had we been checked out so thoroughly in order to know that we were qualified to be parents! It wasn't a difficult process, but it was very tedious and required much organization, as there were so many details. It was a glorious day early in October 2006 to turn all that dossier paperwork in to Bethany and know that it would soon be on its way to China!

It took another 2 months before our dossier was translated and logged in at China at the CCAA (China Center of Adoption Affairs). A very cool God thing is that our dossier LID (log-in date) was November 28. This is our wedding annivesary, and a very special date for us! We knew this wasn't a coincidence. This date officially put us in line for our baby girl. Unfortunately, we entered this adoption process through China along with thousands of other families from around the world. We would find out soon that everything would bottleneck and slow way down. Who knew how long we would have to wait for our referral, which is the official matching of a child with her parents?