Pre-Approval!

On our 12th day of waiting (which is one day after our 12th anniversary!)we received our pre-approval from China! The CCAA was closed for several days last week due to the Dragon Boat Festival so I didn't expect any news until the end of this week, at the earliest. When I opened my email just before noon and saw the pre-approval message from our agency I squealed so loud I scared the dog.

What this means-
China accepted our letter of intent and nurturing/care plan and officially locked her file for us. We still have to get our dossier to China and get through the review room before we will be issued our Letter of Approval (LOA). The LOA is the no-kidding-she-is-yours document but the PA allows us to announce our intent to the world, with photos!

So, without further ado, I introduce...
Claire Hong Yuan

She is 6 years old and waiting for us in Beijing.
One small speed bump is Beijing requires a 14 day stay before flying to the US Consulate in Guanghzou. Instead of our adoption trip being 12-14 days it will be 18-21 days. It will be very hard to leave our other children for that long but on the flip side we will be able to tour Beijing with Claire and have a lot of pictures of her in her birth city. Claire turns 7 in December and we would absolutely love to travel by then so we can celebrate her birthday with her.
Our next step is to complete our dossier and get it to China ASAP. The only thing we need to complete the dossier is our USCIS approval. Once our dossier gets to China they will thoroughly review it and then issue us a Letter of Approval.

Onto the next wait

We finally got five notarized copies of our home study last Thursday. I had the I-800A prepared to mail once the home study arrived...

That is until I read that we'd need a letter from FTIA to go with the home study or USCIS wouldn't accept it. Hats off to FTIA, they mailed the letter that day and we got it on Saturday. So we put our I-800A packet in the mail today. The packet contains the 12 page application to adopt an orphan, our home study and FTIA approval letter, necessary documents and of course a check; everyone wants money in this process.

We will get a letter soon saying they received it and then another letter telling us when our fingerprint appointments are. Once the fingerprints are accepted it will take a couple more weeks to get our approval. I'm hoping we will have the approval by the beginning of July.

We are on Day #6 waiting for our PA. All this waiting; I will either be a master at waiting or never want to wait a day for anything the rest of my life by the time this process is over.