Moving forward...

In an amazingly short 2 weeks, the NY China consulate authenticated my husband's birth certificate. They threatened one month, so, yea! One batch done! 2 more to go.

Looks like our CA documents are still in the mail to my mom. So, once she gets those she'll submit to the Northern California China Consulate. This is silly. Apparently the Southern California Secretary of State office does not do mail requests, so if you send in for authentications via mail (we had to mail our stuff somewhere, so why not straight there rather than to my mom who would then have to walk it in), you have to send them to Sacramento. BUT, then if you want to take them to the Chinese Consulate that is not far away in Los Angeles, no luck. You have to send them to the consulate in the area they were authenticated. Ugh.

Our homestudy appears to be completed so now our agency and our homestudy provider have to somehow work out the details of the agency writing a letter to go with the HS. Not sure how it works exactly. To be honest, I don't care as long as they do it and it's what is required. Once that's done we can finally submit our I800A form. It's ready and waiting at my in-laws' house.

Ok, new glitch. We've taken the past year to get our paperwork completed. That is not counting the almost-year prior that we looked into this and figured out how to do it while living overseas. Our paperwork started arriving back in January, so that's the month when our suff starts to expire (all paperwork must be less than 1 year old upon submission to China). At this point, we're expecting to be 100% done in about 2 months. I keep re-reading Cydil's blog that says she got her USCIS approval in less than 2 months and I'm encouraged. So, as soon as we get USCIS approval, we'll be ready about 2 weeks after that. So, here's the glitch. We're thinking about moving. If we move, we possibly have to then conform to the laws of the place we move to. (thank you Hague treaty, it was hard enough doing this while living in a non-Hague country). We might have to start all over. The thought of this makes me ill.

So, here's the moral dilemna of it all. Whenever you move you have to submit a homestudy update. Fair enough. They want to make sure that you haven't moved from a place suitable for children to a rat-infested studio apartment. But, when we do a homestudy update, we will have to find someone who is approved to do one in that particular area. Although a homestudy update should be merely a formality, if we move to a place that has higher standards than we have completed, we will first need to reach those standards. Some places, in fact, are extremely picky about your agency. And although we have already paid our agency for the adoption, we might be required to find a new agency. Ouch! And here comes the moral dilemma. What are the chances we will be living in this new location by the time the adoption is complete? Hard to say at this point. But, what if we move and redo everything and then move to an other place where we have to redo it back to the original? We're talking thousands and thousands of dollars here not to mention all the stress and aggravation of needing to redo everything. So, would it terrible if we "ignored" our move until we knew whether or not we would be there when the adoption was complete? There is no guarantee how long the waiting period will take. Hey, our girls could be in Jr. High before they have a new little sister. Ok, I exaggerate, but really, some people (random blogs, I need to stay off these kind of things) are even estimating the wait time as long as 7 years! Seriously, this is China. Although the process if perdictable, the time period is not. There are so many factors involved. When we started this process we were told that when we moved "all we would need to do was find a qualified homestudy providor to do a homestudy update". Easy, easy. Hey, we found someone to come to the middle east, didn't we? Finding one in a western country shouldn't be hard at all! Wrong.

It never occured to me that adoption laws would be a factor in deciding whether or not to take a job offer. Ok, technically the job offer has not arrived so it's technically not an issue yet. But it could be soon.