Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Non-Criminals Again!!

Somehow, after the non-criminal certificates were mailed earlier this month, they disappeared in the mail. Who knows if they will ever turn up...so we went back today and obtained new letters, got them notarized (again), and mailed them (again). this time I requested a delivery receipt. I was still too cheap to pay $15 for express mail so we could track the letters. I figure that at the rate China is sending out referrals, we have SEVERAL months to get them this information. Referrals for April came out yesterday, and they only covered 7 days worth of requests. At this rate of a week a month, we will get our referral in October of 2007!!! Of course we hope and anticipate that they will speed back up, but like many things in life, there is no guarantee.

We will continue to rest in God's timing and handling of the situation. He alone knows the answer to all the whys, how long the wait will be, where Hannah is now, whether she is born or not, and knows exactly how we feel.




In the meantime, we are still working on the nursery, and saving up for our trip. Maybe it is a good thing that it is taking longer than we first expected...at least we have saved a little for the rest of the adoption fees and travel expenses. OK, so at least that is what I am telling myself. What I really would like is to quit having to wait... :o)

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Non Criminals Here

We are officially "non-criminals" once again. I was able to get our police clearance letters from the military police that satisfies all the requirements of our agency and the CCAA. At first, we thought that we would have to go through the German government, which unfortunately takes weeks...sometimes months for clearance. Thanks to our lovely SPs who have access to not only criminal records for crimes on base, but to the records of military and their dependents off base as well, we were able to get the same clearance in about 5 minutes from there. Within 30 minutes, I had both letters, had them notarized, and mailed back to our adoption agency - and all for free (except postage).
Now the letters will have to be authenticated and consularized (is that even a word?) before they are sent back to the CCAA. That process takes a few weeks in itself, but is completely out of our hands. Good thing God is in charge of paperwork, because I would rush it through and mess it all up.

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Review Room

Good news, we now know that our dossier is in the "review room". The CCAA has contacted our angency requesting additional information. Since we moved to Germany, they are concerned that we might have turned into a modern day "Bonnie and Clyde". Just kidding, but they do want a police report from Germany stating that we do not have a criminal record. These reports are standard adoption fare, and we got the same clearance from Oklahoma when we originally collected our dossier documents. It is actually a fairly easy piece of documentation to get. Although this will get us one step closer to getting Hannah's referral, we still do not know how soon that will happen. Once our dossier finishes in the review room, it will move to the "matchng room" where it gets matched with a child. Unfortunately for us, the matching room seems to be a bit backlogged, since they are still matching families with LID's of June.
The better news for us is that our criminal record is the only thing that they questioned in our dossier documents. To us, that means that everything else is good, and has passed inspection. Not that we were worried, but it is nice to know that part of the process is almost done.