China Adoption ...The Process

Step #1...Complete many forms, get a homestudy, find your birth cert., marriage license and many more documents. Get everything notarized at the Dept of State. Get fingerprinted for Homeland Security. Get phyical, Gather past 2 yrs worth of taxes, Send all of these documents and forms (about 24 pieces of paper in all) now called a dossier to the Center for Chinese Adoption Affairs (CCAA) in Bejiing China.

Step #2...Once the CCAA recieves your dossier they log you in their books as to the date they recieved your paperwork. Call Log In Date or LID ours was Dec 7, 2005

Step #3...Wait

Step #4...1 year has passed since you did your homestudy and fingerprints. Send in more money to get everything renewed

Step #5...Wait

Step #6.. Dossier goes to the CCAA Review Room Our dossier (paperwork) checked and double checked to make sure everything is filled out the way they want it and that all of our paperwork is in order. Once the dossier is completely reviewed then it is sent to the matching room.

Step #7...Wait

Step #8...Nearly 2 years has passed since home study. You must renew the homestudy again as in PA you can't travel unless you have a current home study.

Step #9...Matching Room...In the matching room they review this months available baby dossiers and make sure there are no issues with them. Parent dossiers are reviewed months before, baby dossiers are reviewed when they arrive and then immediately matched. So now they have a stack of baby dossiers. They look to see how far this stack will go in the month without sending out a partial day and they pull all of those files. That is the likely cut-off date. Sometimes something happens and they don't get this far. Sometimes something happens and they get farther. Next they match orphanages up with agencies. This orphanage has six babies, this agency has six families. These two orphanages are in the same province and have a total of 12 babies, this agency has 12 families. When they are through with this is when (I believe) some agencies start to get information about the cut-off date. And then they start matching individual babies to individual families. The CCAA has matched up to Nov 30th 2005 as of the beginning of Oct 07

Step #10 ...We hear from our agency that we have been matched and are given the details of our daughter. Hopefully this will happen the last week of Oct or the first week of Nov.

I'll let you know about what happens next .... More coming soon (I hope)