Special Delivery

Our awesome agency in China hand delivering our dossiers!!

Happy Birthday to Samuel Fangzhou

Today is the birthday the orphanage gave to Sam. We will never know for sure if this is his actual birthday but we will celebrate this day each year. Sam is now 6 years old! We can't wait to bring him home.

We sent a care package to him on Monday. It is doubtful it has arrived yet hopefully next week. We included a blanket and a beanie baby snake and another wooden snake. Samuel was born in the year of the snake. So I thought those gifts would be appropriate. A Photo album was included with pictures of everyone who lives here, our house and Sam's new room. I hope that he will be blessed by these items and that going to a new home is something that he will look forward to with joy not fear.

Ryan helped us get in touch with a professor of Chinese at George Mason to translate the letter I sent with the package. I e-mailed him to thank him for his help then asked him to translate Sam's name as well. It turns out the professor is from an area very close to Chengdu! small world huh? He said, after seeing the characters of his name, that Fangzhou means literally square boat. The neat thing is that this name suggests Noah's Ark...is that cool or what. I really love that name.

Dossier in China!

We received this from our agency.

Group 308,

Your dossiers arrived safely in China on Sunday, April 22, 2007 and were delivered to the CCAA on Monday, April 23, 2007. Congratulations again! Please do not hesitate to contact your family coordinator with your questions, updates, and concerns.

Grace & Peace,

If we are as fortunate as someone else I know we will be logged in the same week or even the same day!! That would make it very likely that we would travel by summers end.

Dossier to China

We are happy to announce that our dossier is on it's way to China. AWAA is hand delivering a package of dossiers directly to the China Center of Adoption Affairs so that we are sure to make the May 1st deadline. I love our agency! They are the best!

I've added a picture of Samuel in the side bar and the slide show above is a collection of pictures we will be sending to Sam for his birthday. He'll be 6 years old on April 27th.

An Adoption Dossier

On Saturday we received the last piece of paper needed to complete our Adoption Dossier. As I was sharing this news via e-mail with friends from church someone asked, "What is the dossier?" Well this is what I answered her:

An Adoption Dossier is the collection of paperwork that you send to China it includes the Homestudy report done by a social worker, birth certificates, financial statements, police checks, family photos(and more) and the all important I-171-H issued by the US Center of Immigration Services(USCIS) deeming us "suitable" parents and giving permission to bring an orphan child into the country. That last one was the piece of paper we received on Saturday. All these papers have to be notarized then authenticated by the state department of the state they originated in and then Authenticated by the US State Department and finally Authenticated by the Chinese Embassy before it can be sent to China. We had 20 separate documents that each had to go through the process above. We are now waiting for the 171 to come back from Richmond so I can bring it down town to walk it through the last two steps.

Then I will turn it into our Adoption Agency in McLean who has the rest of our dossier ready to go.(it has taken us about 4 months to pull all that together) It will then be sent to China, translated and brought to the Special Needs Department of the China Center of Adoption Affairs for them to scrutinize. They have already issued us "pre-approval" but until they review our entire dossier they won't issue our final Travel Approval. We expect that about the middle of July, I think. Then we'll travel 3-4 weeks after that so we are looking at late August or early September to go to China to bring home Samuel (aka Ma Fang Zhou).

We are rejoicing that this step of the process is coming to a close it is the most arduous part of it all. We then wait and prepare for the trip to China and continue to pray for our Sammy half a world away. Pray that some how God will prepare him for the changes he's to face.