How the Paperwork travels

I wanted to talk about the paperwork involved in the dossier and where it goes. Now do not ask me why- the answer is "because the agency and the chinese government said so." They get the final say, so we do what they tell us!!

The dossier will contain 13 documents.
1. Adoption Petition
2 & 3. Birth certificates for scott and I
4. Marriage certificate
5 & 6 employment verifications for both of us
7. Financial statement
8 & 9 Physical exams for scott and I
10 & 11 Police clearance reports for scott and I
12 the homestudy
13 the I-797 this is the approval form from US Immigration!!

Each document has to be notarized (except the marriage and birth certificates), Certified by the county clerk AND the secretary of state, and authenticated at the Chinese consulate (we will use the one in houston).

So right now documents 1-11 have been notarized and certified by the county clerk. #12 is on the way to the county clerk for certification- it should be back to me thursday. Then 1-12 will be sent to the secretary of state, then when they come back they will be sent to the houston chinese consulate. Oh, I forgot to mention that you cannot actually mail documents to the houston chinese consulate- they only allow walk-ins. We have to hire a courier to walk the documents in and then mail them back to us. Then 1-12 will be sent to our agency to review and double check. When we get #13, we will fly it through the whole process (lots of overnighting in our future) and send it to our agency, then they bind the documents, add our pictures and a few other requirements, like copies of our passports, and send the whole thing to china. That is called the DTC date. (dossier to china). China then will enter us into the computer (Log In Date or LID). We want to be LID before our anniversary on 8-30. If immigration hurries, it will happen. If they take the full 90 days, it won't.

I made friends with the girl at the UPS store today. I will be seeing her alot the next few weeks, and probably should just sign over my next paycheck to them. It was 54 dollars to send the homestudy to altanta and back (plus the 2 bucks they charge to certify the document) and then I will mail 1-12 to the secretary of state in atlanta- but I'm guessing that will be closer to $75 since it weighs more. The secretary of state charges 10 bucks a document for their fee. The courier will be several hundred, and the chinese embassy charges $20 per document and a $5 handling fee. We will owe our second agency fees (about 3400), and a check for 1150 goes with the dossier to china for their fee. If anyone wants to sponsor any step in this process- just let me know ;) 

The entire adoption process is so hurry up and wait. Now we are hurrying to get the documents we have through the process, then we wait for the I-797, then hurry again to be DTC then wait.

The paperwork will travel further than we will when we go to china, bc it has to go to atlanta and houston first!!!!