Number Nine

Since our last post we found that there had been a few errors in our dossier. Even though all the docs had been approved by both the state and the Vietnamese Embassy we had to redo a couple of items. Not a big deal, and we've corrected the errors. We have since found out that we are number nine for a little girl. We'll keep you up to date as we progress up the list! Love to all.

Dossier Log In

Yesterday we delivered our dossier to the agency in PA. The agency "logged" our dossier into the system which is a most important step. Once our dossier is logged in we are officially on the waiting list in Vietnam. It turns out we are number 11 in line for a little girl. The agency was expecting two referrals this week which would move us up to 9th in line. At this point the agency is suggesting we would most likely travel in May or June, which isn't ideal as it is very rainy in Vietnam during that time. I was hoping that we'd travel in March or April, but we'll travel when the agency tells us to travel! Things are unpredictable at best so there is no sense making any plans at this point. Based on this new information we would probably expect a referral for a child in March. The referral is the next big step, with nothing much happening between now and then. We'll let everyoneknow when we receive the referral information!

Go Embassy!

We just received our "legalized" paperwork from the Vietnamese embassy in DC! This is pretty surprising to us because we had been told that the embassy was moving slowly lately and that it would take 4+ weeks to have our paperwork returned. It was actually returned in just over 1 week. Much as everything else has been going with our Vietnamese adoption it happened much faster than we had planned.

So our next steps will be to pull together our other dossier papers, bring them to the agency for approval, and then have them shipped to Vietnam (with a big fat check of course). We were thinking the dossier would be arriving in Vietnam in the beginning of January, now it looks like it will be arriving in Vietnam in the beginning of December.

So I guess our next steps will be:
1. Dossier to Vietnam
2. Dossier log in with the Vietnamese governement
3. Referral of a child
4. Travel

We are still not sure of our timing, and as our process has proven the timing is unpredictable at best. We'll continue to update the blog when items of importance happen.

Cheers.

Introduction

We'll be using this site to update family and friends about the status of our Vietnam adoption. We started the adoption process in June and our paperwork has just gone to the Vietnamese embassy in Washington DC for legalization. We are hearing that the embassy is a bit backed up on the paperwork side of things so it may be several weeks before our documents are returned to us even though we paid for them to be expedited. At this point, we believe that we'll have our paperwork to Vietnam by the end of December, possibly have a referral by the end of February and travel at the end of April. This is all supposition at this point, international adoption being what it is. But we will continue to post changes and updates as they happen. Thanks for all the well wishes from our family and friends!