The CCAA has finished the review of the adoption application documents registered with our office before June 30, 2006.
-- CCAA Front Page

I was reading through my hundreds of feeds when I came across this post from the Rumor Queen's blog. Our login date is June 15, 2006. This means that we passed through a big milestone in our adoption journey. We are out of the Review Room and have taken our place going into the Matching Room. It's still a long line. Longer than we would like it to be. But it is progress. It is a milestone.

This was such great news that I had to wake up my lovely wife.

A friend just graduated from College this weekend. We are very proud of her and her accomplishment. This is a giant step in her young life.

It's been 10 years since I graduated from college. A lot has happened in those 10 years. Not just in terms or career or technology, but mainly in terms of life in general. I went from being a nerdy single guy in Montreal to being a geeky married guy in Denver. From living with my mother to sharing a house with four roommates (at one point) to owning my own house.

It certainly seem that I have made a lot of progress. It's still early in my life. There's (hopefully) a lot more that will happen. We are still waiting to receive our adoption referral and are considering starting a concurrent adoption. We are talking about buying a bigger house since our house would just burst apart with 2 kids. And even that isn't that far out on the journey. Looking ahead I can see where my mother and my grandmothers are in their life.

There's a good reason why they call it a Commencement Exercise. It seemed like it was the end of an era back then (and it was). But it is also just the beginning of a much bigger journey. My friend is just taking her first steps in the post-graduation life. She seems to have it pretty much together with a job lined up and a man that she is very much in love with. I wish her the best of luck!

Almost 8 months ago Mollie and I were notified that the CCAA had received our paperwork. We were LID (which stands for Logged In Date). We had our place in line, and all we could do now was wait and attend a few mandatory classes. We weren't too sure how long it would take to get our referral. We sure hopped that it would be well within a year.

But the wait times keeps dragging on. Mollie has been following different boards and discussion forums. I started looking at them too. And it dawned on us that it would take longer than we thought. And it keeps getting longer. Right now, we both believe that it is unlikely that we will get our referral and go to China this year. It's hard to deal with this for both of us. It breaks Mollie's heart to have to wait so long. It's hard on me to see the dates continually slipping. In many ways, getting Sophia is going to be the start for many, many good things for our little family.

One thing that really bugs me is that I always have the same question each time that I talk to one of my family members. "Did you get news about your little girl?" And I always have the same answer. "No. We will not hear anything until early 2008. Probably later." I know that they mean well. This adoption is a big part of our life. It is just a reminder that we do not have any control over the process at this point and that the wait just keeps going on. And I certainly wish that somehow they would remember that we will probably not get anything for a while.

Someday, we'll have a different answer to give. Actually, we'll be calling on both our land line and our cell phones, trying to reach as many people as we can in our great excitement. We'll be posting pictures and getting ready for what will be the biggest adventure of our life. In the mean time, all we can do is wait. So we wait.

All of our adoption related paperwork is now in China waiting to be logged into the CCAA's systems. It took us a little less than 5 months to go from our application to reaching the "Dossier To China" state.

I wanted to acknowledge There's Always Hope, which is owned by Denise Hope. We had one document that hadn't gone through the sealing process. I simply overlooked getting the translation of my birth certificate through. So we got the translation notarized and certified and then hired Denise to hand deliver it to the Chicago consulate. She turned it around really quick and then sent it directly to CCAI so they could include it in the dossier.

Neither Mollie and I knew that our paperwork had been sent to China on Friday. Mollie did check on the web site, but it wasn't updated yet. I was going through the CCAI web site on Sunday to see where things where. I noticed the date on the "Dossier to China" line. I called to Mollie, telling her that I had something to show her. The look on her face once she realized that we were DTC was priceless.

We are now waiting for the CCAA to log our dossier in their system. We will then start taking the classes that are required by Colorado. And wait.

I got word from Mollie on Tuesday night that the last 2 documents came back from the Chinese Embassy and from the Chicago Chinese Consulate. This officially marks the end of the paper chase. All of our paper work has gone through the sealing process and is ready to be turned into the dossier. We only need to get a few extra passport pictures, choose a few pictures to put in the dossier and we'll be done.

It is interesting to me that Mollie called me while I was walking through San Francisco's Chinatown. We were on our way to an (still to be determined) Italian restaurant. It was the start of an excellent evening.

We reached an adoption milestone yesterday. We received our I-171-H form. This is a USCIS form that grants us the permission to bring in a little chinese girl into the country. This is the last document that we were waiting on. At this point, we only have a few more steps before we are done with the paper chase. This is great progress.

Mollie is out of town, but was very excited when I called her to tell her the news.

It is interesting to see how the news coverage spun the different rallies today. For some reason, the fact that the target of immigration reform is illegal immigration is hardly mentioned. People who were called illegal immigrants only a few weeks ago are now simply called immigrants. There were even shots of people holding signs stating that they were not criminals. How can people who have broken immigration laws claim that they are not criminals?

I am now a Legal Permanent Resident. I have a "green card" (It's not really green, but that's a whole different story). I earned the privilege of living and working in the US by following the immigration laws and processes, filling forms, getting fingerprinted, paying fees and waiting. It took a few months, but I was then able to adjust my status after being a legal H1-B guest worker for many years (one might almost say an indentured servant to a large corporation...) and a TN-1 worker before that. Even earlier, I came here as a student on a student visa. All along, I was careful to remain in status and within the bounds of my visa.

Now, Mollie and I are working with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services in order to adopt a little Chinese girl that we will call Sophia. Again, great care is taken to follow the immigration laws and make sure that she will be welcomed to the US as a US citizen. It is actually likely that she will be a citizen well before I am. We are now anxiously waiting for a document called the I-171-H, which gives us permission to bring Sophia back to the US.

I can certainly understand people's desire to live and work here. This is a great country, and it is the country that I chose to remain in. But I must insist that people coming here go through the same process and regulations that I had to go through and follow the same rules that I had and still have to follow. Not that they are perfect, or simple or even fair. But these are the laws of the land, and these are the rules that you have to follow if you are to live and work here.

After all, it's only fair to me, and it's only fair to Sophia.

The paper chase is doing well. Yesterday, we received a package from the Chicago Chinese Consulate containing authenticated documents. The sealing process is now done for these documents. Today, I dropped Mollie's birth certificate in a Fedex box so it can be authenticated in Houston, and my birth certificate so the Canadian Embassy authentication can be authenticated by the US Department of State. We literally have papers flying all over the country.

It is interesting to learn how the adoption subculture is using words. The paper chase is a good example. It is the process of gathering and generating paperwork and then having this paperwork notarized, certified and finally authenticated. Of course, my paper chase is a little more complex since I had to get my birth certificate from Quebec, send it to Ottawa to have it authenticated by the Canadian equivalent of the Foreign Affairs office, then by the Canadian Embassy in Washington D.C., then by the US Department of State and finally by the Chinese Embassy. Yikes...

Mollie is really concerned about the effects of the CCAA (Chinese adoption ministry, for lack of a better description) slowdown on our adoption. It really hits her hard. Being a mother is something that she has craved for many, many years. Each bump in the road appears as a mountain to her. All I can do is provide her love and support.

I got word yesterday that our social worker was done with the home study. She mailed it over to CCAI so they can start working on getting it reviewed and approved by the Adoption Alliance group.

It was certainly an interesting process. I had reservations about letting a perfect stranger scrutinize our lives. She did a good job of making us comfortable with the whole thing. Mollie really thinks of her almost as a friend. It did help that she went through the adoption process herself and was familiar with the associated tribulations and angst that come with this process.

As a result, we are starting to send the paper work that we can to go through the sealing process. This is a process that validates the authenticity of the documents being presented to the Chinese government. It is quite involved an intricate, and it has Mollie a little worried. It's certainly going to be fascinating to look at how quickly the stack of paper grows.

So the adventure continues, even after the very good news about my new job.

We had our first interview with the social worker on Saturday. It was pretty straightforward. She did a tour of the house and looked over the snow covered backyard. We then proceeded to answer her questions and fill up the SAFE II questionnaire. We'll have follow up individual meetings over the next few weeks to go over these questionnaires and answer questions that may come up. It is certainly a little stressful to Mollie and I since her report will help determine whether we can adopt or not (see Mollie's account of the visit).

We also officially started the paper chase by sending documents to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and to the USCIS offices in Denver. We will probably be able to start the document sealing process shortly also.