Parents applying for international adoption must put together a "dossier," which is like an application containing all the information the country needs to assess your ability to be suitable parents for the child you wish to adopt. Each country has different requirements of what should be included in the dossier.
We had to get copies of our birth certificates, our marriage license, police criminal clearance forms and fingerprints, medical forms, employment verification forms, financial statements, a homestudy, and apply to immigration for permission to bring the child into the United States. If that is not complicated enough, almost all of these documents had to be notarized by a local notary who verifies that the documents are not forged. The documents must be sent to the State they came from to verify that the notary is really a notary. In our case our documents came from three states. Then the documents are sent to the Chinese Consulate so they can verify that the State official who verified the notary seal is authentic. Each of these documents must go through this process before you can send them on the the next step. Some documents you need before you can get other documents (for example, you need to have a copy of the homestudy before you can receive your immigration approval).
This paper chase takes a lot of coordinating and most of all patience. With every document there seems to require the need to have the document redone again and again. For example, Jon's medical certificate had to be redone twice and mine four times. We had to resubmit Jon's FBI fingerprints after waiting for three months as the first copy was smudged. The hardest part was waiting for our final piece of paper-- the approval from immigration. The wait for FBI Immigration took approximately (three and 1/2 months), since we did not live in the State of Utah for five years. Every state we lived in was researched.
After receiving our last piece of paper to complete our dossier we had this document notarized, drove to the State of Utah Authentication office to receive the official State Seal and then drove an hour away from home to our adoption agency to complete our dossier. This document was then sent by Fed Ex to Washington D.C. where it received another official seal and then was sent to the China Embassy to receive another official seal approving us to submit the document to China. We finished the rest of the steps necessary to complete our dossier, and drove to our adoption agency on March, 2004. On April 13, 2004 our agency mailed our dossier to China while we were in Las Vegas and this is our "DTC" (dossier-to-China) date. Once our dossier arrived in China it is placed in a decontamination room for approximately 7-10 days and then is taken out and logged in. Our LID (log-in-date), which is the date the Chinese Center of Adoption Affairs (CCAA) has logged-in our dossier and begins the review process is May 12, 2004. The DTC and LID dates are very important in determining where you are in the process and when your referral will come in. Your referral is the photo or photo's of your children. You will receive all medial information informing you of your child's name, age, date of birth, where they reside and miscellaneous information. This information will usually tell you if your child has teeth and how many or what there favorite toy is and if they can walk, etc. What an exciting day it is to receive your referral as that is the day you find out what your child looks like and where they live!
