mixed results

Well, we went to get our fingerprints done today.  They let us in early, and my prints scanned without incident.  But Tim's first set of four was rejected, presumably due to the spot of psoriasis on his little finger (the tech aborted the process at that point).  Tim has permission to come back any time he thinks his fingers are clear, no need for an appointment.  BUT, this being psoriasis, there is no way of guessing how long it will take to clear up.  He's had this spot for at least three weeks already, and sometimes they persist for months!  So the first thing on my to-do list while Esther is gone at daycare tomorrow morning is to call USCIS and see what procedure we can follow (doctor's letter? documentation of a certain number of attempts?) to get permission to submit just the rest of his fingerprints if this one doesn't heal up soon.  Sigh.

DC trip

I've been MIA on this blog for a while, but there's been a reason--we've been busy!  Last week we had a wonderful visit with my whole family, which I'd like to write about soon.  But before that we had some travel, so I'll back up and talk about that in this entry!

Once we finish our current step in the adoption process, we will be ready to send our dossier (packet of documents) to China for their final approval of the adoption.  But China needs a way to ensure that adoption documents are legitimate.  So, each document must first be notarized at the time it is produced.  Then, the department of state of the state in which the document was signed must review the notary's signature and attach the seal of state attesting that the signature is genuine.  Then (not in all cases, but in our case), the U.S. Department of State must review the state seal and attach the Department of State seal attesting that the state seal is genuine.  And then the Chinese embassy reviews the Department of State seal and attaches their own seal attesting that that is genuine.  And only then can the documents, duly proven to be legitimate, be sent on to China.

So a couple of weeks ago we drove up to our state capitol and got the state seal on all of the documents (like police reports and letters of employment) that had been produced locally.  We didn't have time to mail all of the documents to the State Department in DC, get them back, and then mail them back to DC to the Chinese embassy.  We could have used a courier to get our stack of documents efficiently through both sets of authentications, and in fact it would have cost a little less than traveling there ourselves.  But Esther has been showing signs of really missing her friends again, so I thought that since we were going to be spending money on these documents anyway, why not use it to buy train tickets for Esther and myself to go up to DC, see friends, and walk the documents through their authentication process in person.  So we made plans, and on Wednesday, off we went.

The train ride was fun.  Mostly.  It's about seven hours, which is a long time to be asking an active child to do quiet activities in their seat.  (We did take some walks up and down the cars nearest to us, and of course to the bathroom.)  Esther did very well, though, and I got a feel for what activities are absorbing to her now--information that will be very useful on our long plane trip to China this summer!  (Yes, she is coming with us.)  The scenery was beautiful, particularly on the trip up, when very wet weather caused little waterfalls running down the side of the forested hills.  And we had a cool view of the Jefferson memorial and Washington monument coming into DC.  I did learn that I need to work with Esther on concepts of personal property.  The woman we sat next to at first (who was quite friendly and kind to Esther) had an I-phone, and Esther kept reaching over and trying to grab it out of our seatmate's lap and play with it!!  Then on the way back she spontaneously shared her address and phone number (or as much as she knows of them) with someone we had just met--I guess I'm going to be working with her on privacy too.  Sigh.  She did nap in both directions, though later than usual and under protest.

We had a great time with the friends we stayed with.  Their younger daughter was unfortunately feeling under the weather, but their older daughter (about nine months older than Esther) and Esther had a great time playing together.  We wished we could have seen other friends as well, but really didn't have time, as I spent almost the whole day on Thursday dealing with documents downtown.

Our paperwork process was a "That's Good, That's Bad" sort of experience.

We got the documents to the Department of State Authentications office in time to get them done during their morning hours.  That's good!  But when we headed out towards the Chinese embassy I stood on the wrong side of the street to catch our bus, missed it, and ended up spending 45 minutes standing in the rain next to a busy street, with a backpack of important documents, a bored preschooler, and only one umbrella.  That's bad!  Oh yeah, and because of the delay we missed the morning office hours at the embassy.  That's also bad!  But when we finally got on the right bus, it turned out that the bus route went right by the Safeway where we had met a friend for lunch last time we were in DC, so we hopped off the bus and shared a strawberry-banana smoothie for lunch in a nice, dry spot.  And I had time before the embassy re-opened to stop at a Fed-Ex location and check that I had filled out my airbill for return mail of the documents correctly.  That's good!  When we got to the embassy, we didn't have to wait too long before we got called.  That's also good!  But the embassy requires people submitting documents for authentication to make photocopies of all their documents, and while I had copied the documents themselves, I hadn't copied all of the prior authentication pages.  That's bad!  But the embassy had a photocopier.  That's good!  But the copies were 25 cents each, and I had twelve documents.  That's bad!  But the photocopier was broken that day, so copies were free.  That's good!  So I copied all of the extra pages, carefully put everything in order and double-checked it (meanwhile Esther had fallen asleep in the carrier on my back and my back was killing me), and went back to the window.  This time all the paperwork was in order, but when I went to hand the woman my carefully-prepared FedEx envelope she said, "We don't do mail-back service for walk-ins, only if you mail it in."  That's very, very bad! So I told the woman at the desk that I needed a minute to think about what to do, and quickly reviewed my options.  The documents were supposed to be ready for pick-up in four days, at which point I would no longer be in DC, so I couldn't pick them up myself.  I hated to carry them back home and mail them in after having gone to all the trouble of making a personal trip.  I definitely couldn't afford to pay the fee to get one-day service so I could pick them up the next morning before leaving, and I wasn't real thrilled about paying for a courier service after making the trip in person, either.  Then I remembered that my friend whom I had met in that area for lunch in January actually lives and works within walking distance of the embassy.  So I made an urgent call to her cellphone to see if she would be willing to pick them up for me and mail them to me, and she said yes.  That's GOOD!  So I turned in the documents, double-checked that it would be okay for someone else to pick them up, and heaved a sigh of relief.  We had a further minor mix-up as Grace rushed to meet me at the embassy while I rushed to meet her at her work, but we finally connected (at the Safeway again!) and had a nice little visit while handing off paperwork.

The rest of the trip went smoothly.  The properly authenticated documents are now at WACAP's (our agency's) office, getting ready to be sent to China as soon as our immigration pre-approval is generated.  Meanwhile, our immigration process seems to be going a little more quickly than the norm, not due to any human intervention that I'm aware of, but I know there are people praying!  Our fingerprint appointments are for this Thursday, but we're going to drive up tomorrow morning and see if they'll take us early.  We are praying that a spot on Tim's finger won't cause any problems.

On a side note, I made a discovery in this authentication process that saved us a good bit of money as well as some time.  We had documents produced in four different states, each of which happened to fall under the jurisdiction of a different Chinese consulate or embassy.  If we had sent the three documents that didn't go to the Chinese embassy to their three respective consulates, it would have meant paying additional mailing costs for two of the consulates, and a rather exorbitant (for just one document) fee to use a courier service for a third consulate that doesn't accept mailed-in applications.  But it turns out that the Chinese embassy in DC can accept documents from ANY state as long as they go through the U.S. Department of State first!  (That meant paying for one extra level of authentication, but it was less than the cost of mailing the documents would have been, let alone using a courier service.)  Since most of our documents HAD to go through the embassy, it was much more convenient and less expensive to do them all together.  Yay for that discovery, and for one more step checked off our list!!

relationship advice, and other mix-ups

Lately Esther has been combining lots of ideas in her little head, with...interesting results.

An example.  We have been trying to find "family movies" that we can all watch together.  One of our recent successes was Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.  I explained the kidnapping part ahead of time, and Esther did not seem too disturbed by it.  She loves the music and dancing, and "the part where the barn falls down."  So from time to time she will go around singing snatches of one of the songs.  Recently her favorite lyrics have been, "Goin' courtin', goin' courtin', sing a song of Jesus!"  Not bad advice, actually!  (The real lyrics are, "Goin' courtin', goin' courtin', always sets your senses in a whirl; goin' courtin', goin' courtin', dudin' up to go and see a girl...")

Then the other day she was paging through my Chinese book, shortly after a discussion of childbirth.  She told me, "I have to find 'kumbilical cord, your sins are forgiven,' page 92."

And THEN she tried to serve communion (bathwater in the cap of a detergent bottle) to her toy stingray!  (She was originally going to serve it to me, but I declined.)  She told it, "Stingray, this is the blood of Jesus!"  I hope that's not sacrilegious...but actually, I think that at this age, the fact that she is thinking about communion and exploring it through play is a way of valuing it, not devaluing it.  (Esther has seen us take communion a few times, and is fascinated by it.  She really wants to take communion herself and doesn't get why we won't let her yet--she keeps asking me, but isn't satisfied with my answers!)

Esther has also had some interesting word mix-ups lately.

For example, soda, which she consistently calls Minnesota.  ("Daddy, I want some of your Minnesota!  Pleeeeease!")

We were discussing ethnicity, and I told her I am European-American and she is Chinese-American.  She heard the word "your" in European and asked, "Myapean-American?"  Likewise, when we went to the police station to notarize some documents, I heard her murmur something about "yesarize."

She heard somebody talking about a baby shower and was shocked and amused that somebody would give a baby a shower.

And when she tried her first local gymnastics class (which went great, by the way!), she immediately noticed the other girls' cool outfits.  I told her they were called leotards, but she didn't quite catch the unfamiliar word. She told me, "I wanna tarp!  I want one a dose!" (pointing to the ones hanging up in the lobby available for purchase).  I checked out the prices on the ones hanging up and told her she might get one for her birthday.  But this morning we checked a consignment store and scored two leotards, one of which fits and the other of which is only a little too big!  She is thrilled, and alternated wearing the two of them all day from when we brought them home until bedtime.

Does this look like rain to anybody?

I think our local forecasters need to look out the window, because I haven't seen any rain today since about 9 AM!  Plenty of the white stuff, though.  We still made it to church and back, and Esther and I got some outdoor playtime after her nap.

Meanwhile, it's a good opportunity to post some older pictures of Esther in the snow.  I think I've covered the traditional activities--shoveling, snow angels, sledding, and snowman building--plus pushing a toy truck and looking for animal tracks--in previous posts.  But Esther is nothing if not creative, so besides those stereotypical pursuits we have:

Digging with a trowel (she also spent a long time one day "cooking" snow with a trowel, but I didn't get pictures of it)

Climbing snow mountains

Writing/drawing with a stick (which reminded me very much of the Chinese grandfather I saw one frigid winter day in the square near the university where we taught in China, guiding his grandson to practice painting characters using a long paintbrush and water--which froze on contact and looked quite lovely).

Sucking on an icicle

Riding her tricycle through the path Daddy made

We're all looking forward eagerly to the spring, but...it's been a fun winter!

diplomacy

We have entered the era of negotiation.  And, apparently, a solid comprehension of early numbers.  Not too long ago, Esther and I had the following conversation:

Mommy:  Esther, would you like a cookie?
Esther:  How about two cookies?
Mommy:  That could probably be arranged.
Esther:  How about four cookies!
Mommy:  No, that's too many.
Esther:  How about three cookies?

(Occasionally her math skills fail her, however--today I told her she could watch half an hour of Monsters, Inc. and she said, "How about if I watch it for three minutes!"  Well, yes, three is more than half, but the units of measurement are important too!)

Yesterday she told Tim, "Daddy, I have to talk you into something!"

A dorm-mate of mine in college had a T-shirt that defined diplomacy as "letting others have my way."  Well, Esther has that quality in spades!  Actually, I've been pretty impressed at her ability to think through what might motivate other people, and to use it to influence them.

For example, when she wanted us to take her to the play place at our local mall, she said, "I have to get those wiggles out!"

And when a grandfatherly stranger in the grocery store teased that he would share her lollipop, she clutched it protectively, thought for a moment, and then announced (mindful of all my instruction about not sharing germs),  "Man!  I have a cold."

snow firsts

It seems a little weird to be talking about snow today, the warmest day we have had yet in 2011.  But after all the serious talk about our son, I think it's time for a little Esther cuteness!  And much of her cuteness this winter involved snow.

We could not find a sled that we really liked in the stores we checked, but our neighbor across the street lent us one that he keeps for when his grandkids visit, and it was perfect!!  We have more than enough slope in our backyard to get going fast--in fact, we have to start at the bottom of our backyard hill or we will go too fast and crash into the hedge at the boundary of our yard!  But we had lots of fun.  On the day we borrowed the sled I was feeling nostalgic about my baby's first experience sledding...and then realized that it was my first experience sledding, too.  There just isn't much scope for that sort of thing in Thailand.  But I've discovered I like it!!!

My other personal first this winter was building a snowman.  You know, the kind you always see pictures of, where kids roll snowballs along the ground until they are huge, and then stack them.  I have tried it before, but either there wasn't enough snow or it wasn't the right consistency.  But our last big snow was perfect!  So Esther and I worked together...

...and created "Esther"!  (Guess who named her!)  Here are both Esthers posing together.  Aren't they cute??

Where we are in the process, or, alphanumeric soup

First, some really good news--our completed and approved home study is in the mail, guaranteed to arrive at our placing agency by noon on Monday!!  I don't think it will take them more than a day to send it on to the next step in the process, since they are just as aware as we are of the time constraints on this adoption.

And now, for the edification of those of you who are not veterans of international adoption: a brief tour of the process, so that when I report on our progress you'll know what I'm talking about!

The process we are going through with this adoption is different in some ways than what we did with Esther, both because she was a healthy infant as opposed to a "waiting" child, and because since our adoption of Esther, the U.S. and China have both signed onto the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption.  The Hague Convention is intended to make the process of international adoption more ethical and transparent, and to combat child trafficking.  It is, I think, a step in a very good direction.  But for adoptive parents it has added several additional layers of paperwork to the international adoption process, which was already complex.  There are a couple of steps that I'm still a little unclear on, not having done them before.  But, here goes: the process of adopting a "waiting" child from China under the Hague Convention!

Step 1:  Identifying an agency or waiting child

Some people first decide that they are going to adopt, then decide which international adoption agency they would like to work with, and then start thinking about what kind of child they hope to be matched with.  People in this first category might go all the way through Step 5 (LID) before being matched with a child. Others, like us, "find" their son- or daughter-to-be on an agency list first, and go with whatever agency is listing "their" child.  Lucky for us, our son was listed with WACAP (World Association for Children and Parents), a large, reputable agency with lots of experience in many different kinds of adoptions, including adoptions from China.  Their expertise has been very helpful to us already, and it makes us feel better about our tight timeline knowing that they have successfully shepherded other adoptive parents through some even tighter timelines.  Plus, we feel confident that they have experience with all kinds of issues that adoptive families can have and would be able and willing to talk us through a crisis if we were to have one.

Step 2:  Pre-approval (PA)

(This could happen anywhere in the first five steps, but for us it was our second step, because we already knew which child we wanted to adopt.)  For this step, we had to send certain documents to China, such as a financial statement, medical forms that we filled out ourselves (not unlike the ones you fill out when seeing a new doctor for the first time, though not quite as long), and a letter describing how we intended to accommodate our hoped-for child's medical condition.  WACAP also required us to fill out a great long document called a "Parenting Resource Plan" before they would submit our PA paperwork to China--this was an agency requirement, not China's requirement.  This document asked us how we would handle pretty much any situation that might come up in an adoption, and I ended up writing twenty-plus pages to answer all the questions!  Once our Parenting Resource Plan was completed and all our other documents had been duly mailed to WACAP, they submitted our request to the CCAA (China Center for Adoption Affairs) for pre-approval to adopt this particular child.  The CCAA reviewed our documents, decided that we seemed to meet all the requirements based on that information, and granted us pre-approval.  The process was supposed to take six weeks, but we got our PA in two!  This was the point at which our son's profile disappeared off of WACAP's "waiting children" page, and the adoption suddenly felt a lot more real!
 
Step 3:  home study

The home study is a comprehensive document, prepared by a licensed social worker, which describes the prospective adoptive family and their circumstances in detail, and in the end states whether or not they are recommended as adoptive parents at this time, and what sort of child(ren) (age, gender, level of special needs, etc.) they are recommended for.  We are recommended for one or two children (with the understanding that two children should be siblings), male or female, 0-13 years of age, with mild or moderate medical special needs.  Our home study took FOUR MONTHS to finish!  And neither we nor our social worker was slacking.  But, WACAP is not licensed to perform home studies in our state, so we had to find another agency to do our study.  And while we love the agency we are working with locally and are very excited to know that they will be a resource to us in our post-adoption phase, they specialize in working with children in U.S. foster care, and their policy is that all adoptive parents must become licensed foster parents in this state in order to have an approved home study.  So, we took hours upon hours of classes--foster parent training classes, a crisis de-escalation class, a first aid and CPR class--and met various other requirements that most international adoptive parents don't have to meet.  There was one week that I was so stressed out about it all (or rather, about trying to do it all quickly) that I caught myself daydreaming that our son's foster parents had come forward and asked to adopt him (which would no doubt be a wonderful thing for him if it really happened, but I think if it was going to happen it would have before now), and we were off the hook.  But the home study did eventually get finished, and as of today, we are not only approved as international prospective adoptive parents, but as a local foster care family.  And while we won't be in a position to do long-term foster care anytime soon, it does mean that we, unlike most people, can legally babysit children who are in foster care.  We actually know a couple of families in our area who are doing foster care, so that may come in handy!

Step 4:  Immigration pre-approval (I-800A)

This is the next step for us.  The immigration process can't be started until a family has an approved home study.  Our home study, an application, and a very large fee will soon be going to the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services).  They will check to make sure that we are eligible to bring a newly adopted child into the United States as a family member.  As part of that process, we will have to get our fingerprints made and have an FBI search done on them.  Again.  I have never understood why they can't use the results of the FBI check that we just did for our home study.  I guess that would just make too much sense for a bureaucracy.  Anyway, in a few weeks we will get a letter giving us an appointment date and time to go get our fingerprints taken.  We can (and will) go to the designated place early and try to talk them into doing us as a walk-in so that we can get through this phase as quickly as possible.  On the bright side, they scan prints into machines that tell you immediately whether or not the print is good enough quality and make you do it over until it is satisfactory, so my prints won't be rejected this time.  Once our prints have cleared, we should receive an I-797C notice, which approves us in general to bring an adopted child from another country into the U.S. as a family member, thus giving them U.S. citizenship.  The whole process takes around two months.  If there are complications, it could take much longer.  (But that is unlikely with our application, which is very straightforward.)  If we do our fingerprints early, it could be shorter.  We're hoping for shorter!

Step 4:  Dossier

Our dossier is the official packet of documents that we send to China for review prior to them declaring us eligible to adopt.  It includes our home study, medical forms filled out by a doctor, birth certificates, marriage certificate, police clearances, a financial statement, letters of employment, and things like that.  Most of these forms have to be notarized, then sent to the Secretary of State of the state in which they were signed to have the notary's signature verified, then sent the the Chinese consulate with jurisdiction over that state to have the Secretary of State's signature authenticated.  Then we send the notarized/verified/authenticated documents to WACAP to be translated into Chinese.  We are already moving right along on this process, and expect to have most of our documents done in a few weeks.  The last thing we need before the dossier can go to China is our I-797C notice (see Step 3 above).  Then the dossier can be sent to China (giving us a DTC, "Date To China); logged in to the CCAA's system (giving us an LID, "Log-In Date"); and eventually read and approved by the staff of the CCAA.   We expect that they will expedite us somewhat due to our son's age.  I think this part of the process normally takes around six weeks, but I'm not sure.  Once the CCAA has read and approved our dossier, they will generate a Letter of Acceptance (LOA) giving us official approval to adopt from China.  (Since we already have PA, it is possible that our LOA will actually be called an LOC, Letter of Confirmation.  Our agency has used that term, but I'm a little fuzzy on where it fits in the big picture!)  I think that this is the point at which we are officially allowed to contact our son and start sending him letters, pictures, and care packages.  We are also very hopeful that his orphanage will let us talk to him over skype.

Step 5:  I-800 and Article 5

Once we have our final approval from China, we go back to the USCIS and file form I-800, letting them know which particular child we have been matched with.  This is the part where I get fuzzy on who does what when, but the purpose of this step is for the U.S. to investigate this child's background and make sure that he is a true orphan by international standards and thus eligible for immigration as an adopted child.  I think there are some sub-steps, to wit: the USCIS generates a provisional approval and cables it to the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, which makes a further investigation and generates an Article 5, which gives us approval from the U.S. to adopt this specific child and bring him into the country.

Step 6:  Travel Approval (TA)

Now we get to go back to the CCAA and inform them that we have been cleared by the U.S. to immigrate with our child.  Upon receiving this information, the CCAA will issue us a document (Notice of Traveling to China, also called TA) that we can present to the Civil Affairs office on adoption day showing that we have permission to adopt this child.  At the same time, they will notify the Civil Affairs office in the child's province that we are going to be coming to adopt the child.

Step 7:  Consulate Appointment (CA)

Before we can leave China with our newly adopted child, he will need to go through a medical examination and some immigration paperwork at the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou.  So, unless we are able to be very flexible about the length of our trip to China, we need to know what date we will be appearing at the Consulate before we get our plane tickets.  Generally families are able to get more-or-less the date they request, and it only takes a day or so to get it settled.

Step 8:  travel arrangements

No alphabet soup here, just setting a date with the child's orphanage and Civil Affairs office for us to take custody of the child and go through the formalities of adoption, and then buying plane tickets and booking hotel rooms.  Last time we did all this by ourselves, but this time our agency will do much of it for us.

According to the current laws of the People's Republic of China, children who are fourteen or older cannot be adopted.  Our son's 14th birthday in on June 20.  So, we have to have all these steps completed and be in his province before June 20th.  (The consulate part of the process can be done after his birthday; U.S. law allows children to be adopted and brought in up through age sixteen.)  With all the steps we have yet to go through, I don't see much chance of us traveling before June.  So, unlike most adoptive parents, we don't have the stress of wondering when we are going to travel to meet our child--just the stress of wondering how we're going to get everything done before our deadline!  However, we both feel a lot better now that our home study is finished.  We are now done with most of the grinding paperwork, and what we have ahead of us is a lot of hurry-up-and-wait as we let the agencies of two governments do their thing.