Step 1 - Paperwork

We know that this has been a long time coming, but better late than never.

As you are all aware, the processing in China has been slowed considerably over the past year. As a result, what was originally a 7 month process has now turned into what appears to be an 18 month process. What this means is that it looks like our current timelines for travel to China will be somewhere in the April/May timeframe.

We’ve discussed different aspects of this process with many of you since we’ve started this, but we thought that we’d take some time to give you a bit more detail of what we’ve gone through to get this far. We won’t go through everything that led us to making the decision that we wanted to adopt, and why we chose China, however suffice it to say that we are extremely happy with the choice that we’ve made and the path we have taken.

One thing that you discover quickly is that this is not something you can do on your own. The amount of process, paperwork and logistics that you have to go through would be absolutely impossible if you tried to do it without an experienced agency. After researching a number of agencies that specialized in International Adoption from China, we selected Children’s Bridge (http://www.childrensbridge.com/). We have friends that have worked with this agency and all were very pleased with the service they received. From what we’ve seen so far, we couldn’t be happier. This, as we were about to find out, was the easiest part of the process.

As a high-level overview of the process that came next, we’ll start with the key activities that needed to be completed.

Selection of a registered adoption practitioner (social worker)
..... Completed Mar. 2005
Completion of a home-study
..... Completed Aug. 16, 2005
Collection of all required paperwork to support home-study
Submission of the completed home-study to Ministry of Community and Social Services for approval
..... Approval received Sep. 9, 2005
Collection of additional documentation required for ChinaTranslation and notarization of dossier to send to China
..... Submitted to Children’s Bridge on Aug. 29, 2005 for translation
Submission of dossier to China
..... Sent to China on Sep. 30, 2005

At this point the waiting begins. You are now given the first date that you start to track – your DTC (Dossier to China) date. This is the date that the completed dossier was sent to China – pretty obvious. Children’s Bridge also assigns you to a travel group. We are in Group 247 with 13 other Canadian families.

The next date you get is the LID (Logged in Date). This is the date when you receive confirmation that your information has been received and registered in China, and is used to track where you are in the process in China. Our LID is Oct. 26, 2005. You now start to watch the China Centre of Adoption Affairs (CCAA) website (http://www.china-ccaa.org/) for two “Document Processing” milestones. The first is how far they are in terms of reviewing the documents registered in their office - ours was completed in July, 2006. The second is how far they are in the placement of children. As of Sep. 30, they have reviewed the documents received before Dec. 31, 2005, and have placed children to families whose documents were received before August 9, 2005. The good news is that they have reviewed our documentation and there were no questions or concerns with our application, the not-so-good news is that we still have a bit of a wait until we actually receive our referral. But we’ll outline that process in a following posting.Stay tuned.

There’s more information to come.