We Continue To Make Progress! But Slowly!



One of the historic Pagoda's in Zoe's birth city of Kaiyuan

So…since my last post we have steadily made progress in our adoption process.  We submitted and gained our provisional approval of our I800 form (petition to classify orphan as an immediate relative). We sent the I800 provisional approval to the National Visa Center who has since processed the paperwork so our adoption agency will send the paperwork to China…so you might be asking…what is our next steps…

 1. Our adoption agencies Guangzhou staff will review our documents to ensure every detail follows Consulate guidelines. If necessary, they will ask for or make revisions based on changes in Consulate procedures we may not yet be aware of. These steps may take time but are critically important because if they submit forms that do not conform to guidelines the Consulate may not inform us for several weeks that changes are needed. After this careful review, your documents will be submitted to the Consulate.

2. About three weeks after the Consulate accepts the forms they should issue a document called an “Article 5” for your case. The Article 5 will be forwarded to the CCAA and notifies them that the Consulate has accepted our paperwork and invites them to issue your travel approval.

3. After receiving the Article 5, the CCAA usually sends travel approval approximately three weeks later via DHL, an international express mail service like Fed Ex, directly to Holt in Eugene Oregon.

4. When our travel approval arrives Holt International will let us know by email, then double check the paperwork they have to provide to the Consulate to apply for our visa appointment.

5. After consulting our China staff Holt International will apply for our visa appointment.

6. The Consulate usually confirms appointment requests within a few days. When they do, we will identify your travel dates. Most families arrive in China about four to six weeks after travel approvals arrive in our office.

So, we are anticipating our trip to China to meet and take Zoe home is  approximately  9-12 weeks away…

Other news…this Friday Nathaniel  is competing with his middle school jazz band at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He had to be at school at 6:00 pm this morning so my guess is he will be dragging at the end of the day. We hope they do well… While baseball begins to heat up Nathaniel has his last school wrestling meet this next Tuesday. If he wins this match we think he will be seeded 3^rd or 4^th across Omaha among varsity wrestlers which is awesome. He has had an exceptional year in the 105 pound category.  His record is currently 7-2. But most of all he has improved so much. It is a crazy sport and we never thought he would show any interest in wrestling...boy were we wrong. Now, on to the most important thing… next Wednesday is our deadline to decide what high school Nathaniel will be going to. We have narrowed our options to Gross or Bellevue West.  We hope to be able to make a decision this weekend.  We absolutely have to notify Gross by Wednesday of next week….so stay tuned!  Thanks for taking some time today to read our post!