Several Steps Closer

It's been a good week in our journey to get JinXin. On Monday, we traveled to Kansas City to visit the regional office of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS). There, we turned in our paperwork (known as an I-600A)and a copy of our completed home study (just finished last week) and had our fingerprints taken. If everything is OK (and it should be), in a few weeks we should receive a form called an I-171H, which is the official approval of the U.S. government for us to adopt a child from a foreign country.

Then, on Wednesday, we sent all of our papers off to the Chinese Consulates to be "authenticated". Steve's Ohio birth certificate had to be sent to the consulate in New York, and all the rest of our documents (generated in Missouri) had to be sent to Chicago. We hope to have all of them back in a couple of weeks, also, with the official seal of the Chinese government attached.

Once we get everything back, we'll send it off to our agency and they'll put it all together in the right way and send it off to China. So, for now we are in another holding pattern, but we feel MUCH closer to our goal than we did a few weeks ago. Yep, it's been a good week.