Short version of a long journey

Well this is our first post. I am excited about having a place everyone can see our progress. I will start with a little bit about our adoption journey thus far. It all started with a meeting at Children's Home Society about adopting. We met a wonderful lady named Helen Irvin. After several conversations with Helen about the frustrations of domestic adoption we chose China. I think we knew instantly that it was the choice we were destined to make all along. We applied with Chinese Children Adoption Agency (CCAI) in April of 2006. On May 5th we were approved. We then started our paper chase.... And what a chase it was. It was 5 months of collecting every piece of paper that had anything to do with our lives. We had to have a Home Study, we hired Children's Home Society to do the Home Study, which is more paper chasing and several meetings with Helen at her office and our home. I remember never being more nervous than the day she first came to our home. I drove Joe nuts.... hehe

Now once you have everything together, you have to get approval from the department of immigration to make a foreign in child a U.S. citizen. That is so stressful. They pick you apart. Let me tell you that it is like watching your life flash before you and answering to all the bad things you have ever done. When they finally approved us we received our most important piece of paper called the I600A. This is Hannah's ticket to become a citizen. Now when all that was done we had to get all of the paper work together and that is called a Dossier (daw-see-ey). We then sent our Dossier to our adoption agency on 10/05/2006 exactly 5 months from approval. Then our Dossier went through critical review then it was translated into Chinese and mailed to China on 10/11/2006. China logged us in for our wait to start on 11/08/2006 YEAH!!!!! This was a huge day for us. Well, I hope that sort of gets you to where we are now.......... I will post about the wait later... :-(