We decided to begin the adoption process in October 2008. It took a few months to find an agency which would accept expats and deal with the extra paperwork that entails. On December 31, 2008 we were officially approved by Great Wall China Adoptions to move forward with our adoption. We spent the next 5 months collecting the mountain of required paperwork. Most of the documents had to originate from the states, so our friend Marilyn took on the huge responsibility of collecting those documents. We also completed our home study during this time. By June 2009 we had officially turned in our dossier to China and begin waiting for our Log-in-Date which is an important date in the adoption world. We were notified 4 months later that our Log-in-Date was September 3, 2009. Now all we had to do was wait.
Because we live in China, we were given an expedited status. This meant that we would receive our referral in half the time as the usual wait; however, by this time the China adoption program had drastically slowed down its rate of referrals. It was estimated that we would wait at least 3 years for a healthy baby girl.
In November 2009 we made the decision to adopt an older child. It wasn't a hard decision to make. We immediately told our adoption agency that we were open to adopting a little girl, age 5-6, with a minor special need. Two months later on January 25, 2010 we were matched with our daughter. We received Prior Approval to adopt her on January 29 and our Letter of Acceptance on March 22.
Our I800 was approved by USCIS on May 14. We are finally on the last leg of our wait! We hope to travel to pick up our daughter from her orphanage in Shenzhen, China around mid-July.
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