The Process...Adopting from China

Our steps in the adoption process:

1. Application: We located an adoption agency and applied to adopt a child from China. There are MANY adoption agencies that handle China adoptions. They all do the same job, but in a slightly different way. It's important for parents to find an agency they feel comfortable with. I researched a lot of different agencies and decided on Chinese Children Adoption International (CCAI). If you are interested in adoption and want to know more about why I chose CCAI, send me an e-mail at maf127@aol.com.

2. Paperchase: We had to assemble a dossier, including birth certificates, marriage certificates, home study, criminal background checks, medical release, employment verification, and permission from the US government to adopt a child from abroad. Since they will never meet us, the dossier is what the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) uses to determine if parents are suitable to adopt a child. CCAI was a big help with this, but it is NOT a fun project (unless you are a fanatic organizer and maybe have some obsessive-compulsive traits!). All our documents had to be notarized, certified and authenticated (yes, an onerous process, but I like the way it sounds like a blues song). CCAI translated our dossier into Mandarin before it was delivered to the CCAA.

3. Dossier to China (DTC): Like any other club, the Chinese adoption community has its jargon and its acronyms. DTC is one of them. What it literally means is the date that our dossier was delivered to the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) in Beijing. CCAA is the Chinese government agency that oversees all adoptions in China (not to be confused with CCAI, our agency). That is the literal meaning. What it symbolizes for the adoptive parents is the first major stepping stone in the process. Our DTC was 2/21/05.

4. Log-In Date (LID): This is the date that the CCAA officially logged in our dossier at their office in Beijing. This could be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks after our DTC. In our case, our LID was 2/26/05. The LID is the date that starts your official "wait."

5. "The Wait": This is the time between our LID and our Match Day, the day will be officially informed that a child has been "mathced" to us. The time between LID and Match Day varies, but it averages six to seven months. During the Wait, our dossier goes through some mysterious process in China where it is read, checked over, stuck in a pile, meditated over (just kidding; I'm not 100% sure about that last part). Honestly, their process is mysterious to adoptive parents. For the parents, the Wait is different for each person. For Maureen, the Wait has involved signing up for baby registries, reading lots of books about China adoption, and signing on to the Yahoo groups for China adoption to keep up with the news and gossip. For Lindsey, the Wait has mostly meant coughing up additional fees to the agency, going to some parenting training and listening to Maureen tell him about all the news and gossip from the Yahoo groups.

6. The Referral ("Match Day"): This is the day we are officially informed by CCAI that we have been matched with a child. They will tell us the gender and age of the child we will be adopting. They will also be able to tell us where the child is living now, in which orphanage or Social Welfare Institute (SWI), and maybe the birth date. They will tell us the child's Chinese name and what it means in English, and something about the child's health. They will also give us pictures of the child!

In their dossier, parents can request a baby of a specific gender or age range. This is only a request that the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) attempts to fulfill, but may not be able to match. Very little is known about how the CCAA matches children to families. There are many factors taken into consideration including: parental age, income, education, physical appearance, other children, number of children available from orphanages and their ages, and number of other dossiers submitted at the same time.

We requested a healthy male or female child between 0 and 12 months and as young as possible. Because of our ages, we are approved to adopt a child up to the age of 24 months. Theoretically, we could be matched with a child even older than 2 years old, but that is not very likely. Most children are between eight and thirteen months old at the time of match, or "referral". Since we did not specify a gender, it is possible that we could be matched with a boy. The vast majority of children available for adoption in China are little girls (as high as 95%), but since most people request a girl, and we did not specify, there is about an 11% chance we could be adopting a boy.

We will not know anything about our child until CCAI calls us on Match Day.

7. Travel to China: Anywhere from 4 to 8 weeks after Match Day, we will travel to China to adopt our baby. CCAI will arrange our travel, as well as the travel for our whole travel group. Parents with similar LID's and with children in the same orphanage usually travel together; this could be as many as 15 families. CCAI and the travel agency they work with will make all our travel and hotel arrangements so that we can focus on our child and our adoption. They constantly tell us not to think of this as a vacation; this is an adoption trip, and we need to get to know and bond with our baby. But we are hoping to see a little of the country. CCAI will arrange some optional tours that we plan to go on. We will probably be in China for a total of 10 days to 2 weeks. We have no idea where we will be going in China; that depends on where the baby is. But we do know that we will probably fly into Hong Kong first. And we will end up in Guangzhou ("Canton") because that is where we will have to get our baby's passport and visa for the US. We will adopt him/her in China, but once we get back home to Colorado, we will have a "re-adoption" in the Colorado courts. According to US law, our child will become a US citizen as soon as we land in the US.

8. Coming Home: Life returns to "normal" (?). When we get back to the US, we will take a few days to recover from the trip. Then Lindsey will go back to work, and I will use some sick time and maternity leave to bond with our baby. Because s/he will have been abandoned and placed in an orphanage, there will be attachment problems, and we will need to bond with her/him. It will be important that we sort of "nest" with our child and pretty much "hole up" for a while. For a month or so, we will be the only ones to feed, comfort and provide for the baby, so s/he learns to trust that we are now her/his parents, FOREVER.