Whew......and Grumble............

I am going to share the details of yesterday so others will know the road in which we are now walking. We officially made the decision to change adoption agencies on June 28th. We contacted our adoption agency that day and asked that our dossier be sent to the new agency. It was not done until July 3rd but was sent and was complete upon arrival. Since we had obtained pending approval from CCCWA for our daughter we also had to ask that she be "unlocked" by the agency so that the new agency could lock her in for us. At the beginning of that following week I learned that due to the status of our daughter at the time of us receiving pending approval for her that she would have to be placed back on the "Shared List". The Shared List is a list updated at least once a month by China and contains around 1,600 special needs children waiting for homes. Any agency world-wide has access to this list and has the capability of "locking" a child's file for seventy-two hours to allow a family to review the file. This was extremely disconcerting! There was a risk of us losing her!! The possibility existed that when her file was placed back on the list that another agency could see it pop up and lock it in prior to our new one being able. Had she been a special focus child as we thought she was it would have just been an easy agency to agency transfer. Our new agency who is AWESOME contacted China on our behalf and advocated for us. After a week of our daughter's file being unlocked we learned last night that our agency was able to officially lock her back in for us!! When the email popped up with the subject line "Got Her" I started screaming! Literally screaming and crying with joy! Her little face is in my heart, soul, and mind. I have been staring at her face since February. The one week of uncertainty was one of the most difficult weeks in my entire life. The thought of losing her was more than I could fathom. Now today our agency will submit a new Letter of Intent for us to adopt. We will hopefully get pending approval in the next week! I am praising God that the process of re-locking her in for us proceeding so smoothly! Now for my grumble! When you adopt from China you must obtain approval from the United States Government USCIS division. The USCIS handles immigration matters. We overnighted our application to them and it was received on 5/18. A requirement is that you must be fingerprinted electronically at your local office. This was done on 6/4. As with most governmental functions the wheels turn slowly. We were not assigned an officer to review our case until 7/2. He contacted me on 7/3 to tell me that he needed further documentation in order to adjudicate our case. Evidently the one page certified certificates of divorce were not sufficient. He asked for actual divorce decrees. OK - easy fix in my mind. Just a visit to the courthouse. Then he said he needed more verbage in the summary and recommendation section of our home study. He said he would be sending out a letter detailing his requests. As of yesterday no letter had been received and I have been stalking the mailman daily. We called and sent an email. I received a message today that he will send the letter out in 3-5 days! Seriously????? My child is waiting. So now once we obtain the letter we have to submit it to the social worker who will have to do her part. We will have to send the documents back to USCIS. We then will have to wait on approval to come in the mail. A copy of that form will have to be notarized. I will have to get it certified on a county and state level. Then forward it overnight to the Houston courier who will take it to the Chinese Consulate for authentication. She will overnight it to our agency. Then and only then can our dossier be sent to China!! I wish that people could see the files as being a CHILD waiting on a family. A child with medical needs not being met. A child who is hungry. A child without a Mama or Baba. A child without the love and security of a family. NOT A STACK OF PAPER! Ending on a happy note! We were able to arrange a birthday party for our daughter at her orphanage. This is one of the photos we received afterwards! We want her home now! Oh, and she has icing smeared on her face in case you were wondering!