The Next Step

It's so hard to keep you a secret, T.J. Right now your blog is dark and only I can read it. But we cannot be completely sure you are ours until our documents are sent to China and get the approval of the Chinese government. We can't post your picture or your name or your details. Yet.

The process has been excruciatingly slow. Since China signed the Hague Treaty on Adoption, the long paperwork process has become more complex and full of loops where bits of information can get stuck and delayed. So far we have had a few documents expired and lost a few others. Now it is taking a very long time to get our 1-800a form processed. Our home study took along time to finalize. Once we sent it off with the 1 800a, we waited nearly three weeks for a receipt to certify it had arrived at USCIS central processing. It took another 12 days to get a piece of paper setting our fingerprinting appointment for June 9. The average processing time for an 1-800a is 50 to 80 days. After that, the average time between sending our dossier to China and actually traveling is about 16 weeks if all goes well and if we don't run into questions or delays or spill coffee on a notarized document or miss a deadline. And then there is the Guangzhou trade fair. A lot of agencies don't allow families to travel during this period. Guangzhou is crowded and airfare and hotels are at their highest prices.

When we started adding up the days and weeks, we realized that the little boy whose photo and file had charmed us when he was six and a half might be close to 8 by the time we brought him home. And so we decided to march  (OK, creep) into the USCIS office before our appointed day in an effort to trim a few weeks off this process.

Who knows what reception we'll get? It's only been a few weeks since the Times Square bombing attempt. USCIS offices everywhere are probably extremely busy. But other families have walked in and succeeded. Maybe we'll be lucky. But we don't know anyone who has walked in in our state. And of the people we know of who have tried to walk in, we have heard only success stories. Has anyone been thrown out? Stay tuned.