The Paper Chase Begins

Jamie and I just got home from our orientation meeting with CCAI. Wow… the paperwork is thouroughly confusing and a monumental task. We have to get a bunch of documents together. They all have to be notarized. Once all of them are notarized, we send them all to Colorado State. They “certify” that the notary is valid. I think that’s about $12 per page + express shipping. Once we get those back ( each document will have a new document attached certifying the notary ), we ship them to the Chinese Consulate for our region. The Consulate “authenticates” the certification ( probably another $15 per page + shipping ). Basically, they are just saying that the “certification” signature is authentic. Finally, we then send those documents back in to CCAI.

This is the “dossier” phase. We need to contruct our dossier with paperwork ( medical screening, birth certificates, copies of our passport, financial statement, etc ) and photos. This is what will eventually be submitted to CCAA ( Chinese Center of Adoption Affairs ) . The CCAA is the final authority in China. They will decide if we are eligable to receive a child and which child we recieve. Once CCAA approves our dossier, we are assigned a “Log-In-Date” ( LID ). This begins the actual waiting period for a match. Right now, we are looking at roughly a 21 month wait after the LID.

Hopefully we can get our dossier in as soon as possible. We still have to chase down lots of paperwork.