We sent in the official application to our agency on September 17, 2012 and it has been a long seven months of paperwork and waiting. The first big hurdle was getting the paperwork for our home study and the home study visits. China requires four in-home visits for the home study and since all of this was taking place around the holidays (Thanksgiving and Christmas) it made scheduling them tricky. Luckily we had a wonderful caseworker, Amy, who was really good about getting the visits and home study done as quickly as possible (I think she understood my type A/OCD personality). During this time we were working on all of the paperwork and forms, getting fingerprinted, making copies, requesting documents, getting our passports, requesting reference letters from family friends, attending training, and of course saving, saving, saving ($). We had all of our home study visits in November and December and our awesome caseworker had our home study written and sent to the agency by the end of the year.
The next big step was to complete and send our I800A, along with a copy of our home study, to USCIS (United States Citizenship & Immigration Services) which happened on January 21, 2013. While waiting on our biometrics (fingerprint) appointment we had a lull on our end of the paper-chase, but it didn't last long because we received notice that our biometrics appointment was scheduled for February 22, so on February 11 we started working on our dossier paperwork (the dossier is all the paperwork that is eventually sent to China). If I thought the home study paperwork was a pain then the dossier paperwork was a royal pain, and it felt like it went on forever. We had our biometrics appointment on February 22 and were just waiting on our approval (I-797) which our agency consultant said usually takes 10-14 business days, but ours arrived in the mail less than a week later on February 27 so I kicked into high gear finishing up everything for the dossier. {All of the dossier paperwork has to be first notarized by either an attorney or a notary (if notarized by a notary it also has to be county certified) and then the notarization has to be authenticated by the Secretary of State's office.}
Our sweet friend from church offered to ask her dad, who is an attorney, to notarize our documents for us and he was generous enough to agree. We met him at his home and he notarized our huge mountain of paperwork, but once we got home and I looked through the paperwork I had a feeling that a few of the notarized documents might not work because of the way I worded the notary statement. I contacted our agency consultant the next day and she said that it would definitely be better (and safer) to reword the documents and have them notarized again. I felt terrible having to call my friend and ask if her dad could redo a few of the pages, but they were both so wonderful and we met him a few days later at my friend's house where he notarized our new pages. At this point you would think that we were ready to move on to the next step (state certification), but you'd be wrong. A few days later and the day before I had planned to take all of the paperwork downtown we discovered that we needed to file an amended tax return (a copy of which was part of the dossier). This wouldn't have been too bad since I could just print a new copy and attach it to the notarized page, but upon closer inspection I discovered that I had typed the wrong tax year on our notarized statement which meant....the notarized pages had to be redone and notarized a third time! To be honest, at this point I was about to the breaking point and was seriously considering throwing in the towel on the whole thing.
I had planned to take the whole pile of paperwork downtown the following day and I was determined to have the dossier done, so I decided I was going to do whatever I had to do to finish the whole thing the following day (March 11). I refused to bother my friend and her dad again, and knowing he couldn't notarize on such short notice, I took the new tax return statement pages to the bank and had them notarized. I then took them to the local County Clerk of Courts office to have the notarization county certified. Then we picked Jason up from work and went downtown to the Secretary of State's office and had the entire pile of paperwork state authenticated. After dropping Jason back at work I drove directly to FedEx and shipped the whole pile to our agency (oh, and all of this was with three kids in tow).
So, there I was, elated and relieved to finally be rid of the dossier paperwork headache, and trying to decide what to do with the free time I have now that all the paperwork is done when I get a call on March 13 from our agency consultant. She had called to tell me that I had missed having five of the documents state authenticated (this is because I'd thought that since those documents did not have to be notarized then they also did not need to be state certified - I was wrong) which meant that those documents had to be sent back down to the Secretary of State's office to be authenticated (seriously - I couldn't make this stuff up). This extra step should have only caused a one week delay, but the Secretary of State's office missed authenticating two of the documents when they were there so those had to be sent back down a second time causing a two week delay (grrrr).
But this is not the end - oh no. Once all of our dossier paperwork was state authenticated it then had to be certified at the Chinese consulate before being sent to China, so on March 23 our dossier was off to New York. Once certified at the consulate the dossier was sent back to our agency where our consultant gave it another once over before sending it to China. Then finally, on April 4, our dossier was done and on its way to China (DTC)! I was so thrilled (and relieved) to finally have it on its way that I wanted to have a dossier completion party, but my excitement has waned a bit since then because we are still awaiting our log in date (LID). It has been almost three weeks, so I know it will be soon, but can I just tell you that the waiting is killing me?! (Oh, and did I mention that this is only the beginning of lots and lots of waiting.) In case you don't know me very well....I am not good at waiting! In fact, I am really bad at waiting! Do you think the Lord might be trying to teach me something through all this? I'm thinking of doing an entire post on waiting for my next blog entry. :)
Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord! ~Psalm 27:14
