Sent off I-800A

I sent off our I-800A, otherwise known as the Application for Determination of Suitability of a Child from a Convention Country, yesterday!  This is a 9-page application (plus two separate 1-page Supplement 2 forms, in our case) asking the United States Citizenship & Immigration Services to determine our qualifications as adopters (approval to adopt internationally).  Now, we will wait impatiently patiently for our fingerprint appointment to be mailed to us.  This may take 30 days or  more.  We will be told when and where to show up for our fingerprints (biometrics).  Once that is done, we wait for them to process our application.  They will read our Home Study, review our application, and check state child abuse registries, which can take another 30 days or more but has been running a little less, lately.  This is the last document we need for our dossier!

In the meantime, I sent our first 12 documents to a courier to be taken to the IL Secretary of State for certification and then to the Chinese Consulate for authentication- all in Chicago.  So, basically, all documents have to take the following steps:
     1) notarized to verify our signatures (except for our certified birth and marriage certificates)
     2) certified by the Secretary of State in which they were notarized to verify that the Notary whose name is on the document is a true and current Notary
     3) authenticated by the Chinese Consulate to verify the authenticity of the Secretary of State's signature and seal

Some states and regions also have other steps to this process.  And all of this, of course, requires fees.  Once we get our I-800A approval, that will also have to be sent for certification and authentication.  The reason I have decided to do it in 2 batches is so I have time to fix any little issues that come up in this process.  Sometimes a notary doesn't word things quite right or whatever.  I might as well deal with these issues while we are awaiting our I-800A approval.  Plus, the Chinese Consulate will not authenticate any document that was notarized more than 6 months ago, so we are working on a time table here.

Our pictures are here, and the only other thing we need is for Kevin to go get 6 copies of a passport style picture of himself.

That's it!  We are coming into the home stretch of having our dossier finished!