September 8, 2004 Referral Arrives today

My husband and I both stayed home from work because we wanted to get the referral info and pictures together. Everytime we heard a truck, we ran to the door to see if it was UPS. My dad kept asking too if the pictures came yet, but we were still waiting.

I was certain they would arrive by 2 pm. Other CHI families had received their referral photos already and we were still waiting. I was getting so impatient. I was certain that we now were not going to get our information today. What if it got lost??? By 3:30 pm I called Carrie at CHI to make sure that the package went out and they were still coming. Carrie was in the NYC office, which is the office that we worked with, but the information was shipped from the Saint Louis office. That is why we received a fax of a fax yesterday. St. Louis faxed to NYC and then NYC faxed it to me. Carrie assured me that the info was on its way.

I was talking to my husband when I saw the UPS truck out of the corner of my eye. I jumped up from the couch and ran to the door shouting, "UPS IS HERE." I flung open the door and there was the UPS driver across the street from us. It was not our usual driver. He was just sitting there looking at paperwork. My dad cam out and the three of us were waiting for the driver to come.

When he finally came to the door, I snatched the envelope from his hands. It actually had the wrong address on it! No wonder he was staring at the paperwork! No matter now, we raced to the kitchen to open it. The dogs were barking. I think they knew something good was about to happen.

When we saw her beautiful face in color, we grinned from ear to ear. SHe had chubby cheeks and a lot of hair. She was perfect. My dad said she looked like a Gerber baby. The three of us just stood around starring at the referral photos, three in all.

Photo will appear in the next post!

DTC & LID

The home office of CHI in Saint Louis had my dossier and were looking it over to make sure everything was there that was supposed to be there. It takes a while to do this, gather up all the dossiers that were going at the same time and then send them to China, DTC (Dossier to China) . However, CHI sends them to their office in China to have all the dossiers translated into Chinese first. Some agencies translate the dossiers in the US an then send them to the CCAA for processing.

Why is this important? Well, once you know when the CCAA has logged in your dossier, then you can estimate when you will be getting your referral. In my case, being DTC wouldn't give be an estimate because DTC just meant it was going to the Chinese office of CHI. What I needed was a LID- log in date. This is the date that the Chinese governemnet logged in my dossier. This is the date that I could use to estimate when I might receive my referral.

Another hitch is that CHI knows when they send the dossiers to the CCAA, but that date doesn't matter either (not that they tell us this date). The dossiers could be sitting on someone's desk in China for weeks before someone actually logs in the date that it was received.

Although we sent the dossier to CHI in January, it still had to go through processing on their end in the U.S. and in China. I was hoping to have a February LID, but would have to wait until I received my official notification from CHI.

in 2004, referrals were coming 5-7 months after LID. If we had a February LID, we could get our referral in July or August and that would mean we'd be in China in September or October! We just need a LID!!!!

I Need TWO Agencies?

We live in NJ. Our adoption agency is in NY. Houston, we have a problem. We are required to have a home study done, but it must be done by an agency that is licensed in NJ since that is where we live. This is just terrific because now I need to find an adoption agency in NJ to get this done.

One year before officially embarking upon this adoption journey, we went to an information meeting at an agency in NJ. We did not particularly care for them. The director made some inappropriate comments to a woman in the audience who was asking why she couldn’t adopt an infant. (She was 50 and her spouse was 55). There are ways that things could be phrased so as not to sound offensive. The director didn’t choose the high road and it turned me right off. I didn’t like them because they were a very small agency. If I was going to be in China, I sure as hell wanted to know that there was going to be someone in my corner and wanted the reassurance that a larger agency could give me.

Anyway, we decided to use this small agency for the homestudy. It was conveniently located to us. NOTE: convenience is not a reason to pick an adoption agency. More on that later.

One Step at a Time

Seven days after the information meeting in NYC, we received the phone call from CHI saying that our application has been approved. Our CHI caseworker was Carrie W. It's official. We were now in the paperchase phase of adoption.

Carrie W. called me and she would turn out to be my lifeline through the process. The number of documents we are required to gather is staggering. In addition, each document needs to be notarized, state sealed and authenticated by the Chinese Consulate. In addition to the documents required by China and the state and the feds, we also have to gather all the paperwork data for our homestudy. A lot of this is the same information, only it has to be on the form provided by the requesting agency. Can you say, "Duplication of Efforts?" It is all so overwhelming. What the hell is a state seal anyway and where do you get one done?

Take a step backwards and take a deep breath. I am very well organized. I know I can do this. Breath. We will get there. One step at a time.

The Information Meeting

I was so excited about the meeting because if we liked them, then we could start the process, whatever that entailed. The weird thing is that I couldn’t tell anyone about this at work. It’s like having this great secret that you cannot share with anyone. I didn’t want word to get out about this until I was ready to share that information; still, it made the day go by excruciatingly slowly. I even left a little early because we had to be in New York City by 6:30 pm.

We’re true New Jerseyians; we do not take public transportation into NYC. We drive and then complain about having to pay $50 to park the car. We got into the city pretty quickly and set about to find the meeting place. It wasn’t at the adoption agency’s office. It was on West 14th Street at the YMCA. We found it easily and there was a parking garage only a block away. So far so good, right? We went to the YMCA and there wasn’t any sign indicating there was a meeting for the adoption agency. I asked someone at the desk, but they knew nothing about it. They asked someone else, who said they were unaware of any adoption agency meeting. I immediately went into panic mode.

Maybe this whole thing was a scam. Why on earth would an adoption agency have a meeting at the Y anyway? Just my luck to pick the wrong agency, right? I whipped out my cell phone and called CHI. Maybe we had the wrong address. It was 5:30 and no one was answering the phones. I was put into general voicemail and I left a rambling message about being at the Y and they didn’t know anything about the meeting and perhaps I had the place or date wrong and could someone please call me back as soon as possible if anyone is there and….Well, you get the rambling idea.

I hung up the phone and proceeded to burst into tears. Not that I attracted any attention whatsoever. I mean, this was NYC after all. AR couldn’t understand why I was so upset. To me, this was the start our journey to a baby and I didn’t want any roadblocks so early into it. He calmed me down and we decided to get something to eat and would come back closer to 6:30.

We only walked about half a block and found a McDonalds. I never eat at Mickey Ds because 1. I was a vegetarian and #2., I can’t get things my way there, but I really didn’t care at all on this particular evening. We sat down to our meal. I had a diet coke and French fries. AR had a Big Mac. Gross. It was at this point that I started to notice all of the unsavory characters in the joint. Looked like gangland to me and I wanted to leave the second we were done.

We walked back to the Y and Albert went back inside to see if anything had changed. Perhaps a sign had gone up or someone else would know something. Nope, no change in that regard. At 6:20, 5 people dressed professionally walked past us, smiled and went into the Y. We just knew that they had to be the adoption agency. We trailed after them and sure enough, that is who they were. I was relieved. This wasn’t a scam, and everything was going to be all right.

They took a few minutes to get set up and put signs around. Other people started showing up. There were about 8 other families/couples there for the meeting. They began by talking a little about themselves and CHI. Then they asked each family to introduce themselves and say what country they were interested in adopting from. We went first and said China. Everyone else was interested in Russia or former parts of Russia.

The coordinator of the China program went over all the basics of who can adopt from China, how long the process will take and costs and travel time. To adopt a healthy child, Chinese law requires that the parents be over the age of 30. China has an upper limit of age 55 for parents. Parents aged 50-55 must be prepared to accept a child of 3 or older. The parents also need to have sufficient income to support the child and to be in reasonably good health. We we fit all of these requirements.

The wait time in 2003 from when your dossier (documents) were all completed and sent to China was 18 months from log in date (LID) to a referral. The LID is when the Chinese government actually officially acknowledges receiving your paperwork. They ensure all the requirements are met and then they match your dossier to a child. When the match is done, your agency is sent a referral for you. The referral is contains some photos and some information about how old and where your baby is in China.

Once you have your referral, you then will travel to China eight weeks later to get your baby. You usually spend 12 days in China, but some people arrive earlier to sight see before meeting the baby. The agency arranges all in China flights and hotels and you arrange the flights to arrive in China and go home.

The process takes a long time. There are a lot of documents that you need to get together for your dossier. Even if you are an eager beaver, you still are subject to delays because of government delays at the local, state and federal levels. Once the paperwork is sent to China, the paper chase phase is over. Everything is out of your control at that point and you are then officially waiting. The good news is that everything is pretty well organized and time frames are predictable.

We listened to the spiel about the Russian program too. Things were not so predictable there. The program is not centrally administered through one area as it is in China. Each province of Russia can have different forms to be filled out and different fees. The time frames are not predictable. Once Russia has your dossier, you could get a referral in as little as 4 weeks or as long as 6 months. You do not get a photo. You must fly to Russia to meet the child. If you decide that you would like to adopt the child, you fly back home and complete more paperwork and then you have to fly back to Russia to finalize the adoption and bring the child home.

I asked how many referrals were refused in Russia. The answer was 1 in 3. I was shocked! Even though you specify that you want a healthy child, the referral you receive might be for a child with special needs, so that is why the referral gets refused. If you refuse the referral, they will try to show you two more children to adopt, but if you refuse them, you go back home and wait for another referral. Then you have to fly back and do the meet & greet again to decide if you will accept the referral. Again, if you accept, you fly home and complete the paperwork, and then you have to fly back to get your child. Three flights to Russia is not uncommon for one adoption, and this can get very expensive.

They had answered all of our questions and they had families who recently returned from China and Russia there with their children. They told us their experiences and answered all of our questions too. We were very pleased with the meeting. AR and I decided to hand them our application and check for $100. They were surprised, but I told them that we were sure about them and adopting from China. I also asked them to ignore my crazy voicemail that I had left for them. I was hoping that when they heard it that they wouldn’t brand me a lunatic and throw out our application.

Now we had to wait to see if they would accept us as clients. Our first test of many to come.