We're Buried Under a Mound of Paperwork!!!!

We are currently in the process of completing 2 important parts of the adoption process.

1. Dossier - This is a collection of documents that China requires in order to place us with a child. The documents include things like our birth certificates, marriage certificate, physicals, financial statements, employment verifications, background checks, passports, etc. Sounds easy, right? Ha!!! Each document has to be notarized. Then, each document gets sent to the state it was notarized in to be Certified. Then, each document gets sent to one of the US Embassy/Consulate locations to be Authenticated. So completing our Dossier is a lot of filling out forms, waiting on letters, and writing checks for each document to be certified and authenticated!

2. Homestudy - This is an investigation into our family to make sure we are able to appropriately care for a child. There is a lot of document gathering here as well, but none of the notarizing, etc. Our social worker will meet with us in our home at some point to make sure we have enough room and that our home is safe.

Working on all of this is taking up a lot of our time. We're hoping to have all of this completed in the next 2 months or so and then the real waiting begins.

To help pass the time, we thought we'd share with you some of the reasons we're adopting and how we got to this point. So be on the lookout very soon for that!

Also, we'd like a new name for our blog. We are NOT creative in this respect, so if you have any ideas, we'd love to hear them! We'd like the name to reflect China somehow. Thanks in advance!

As always, if you ever have questions about any of this stuff, please feel free to ask! We're very open and would love to answer questions as best we can.

Aaron, Sherry, and Luke