Another Step Completed, One to Go!

It’s been a rather eventful week. Suffice it to say that things are moving along much quicker on our second adoption as compared to our first. On Wednesday I got an email from a Dillon representative informing us that we could go ahead and begin gathering our final Dossier documents. This is a huge step, as this and the I-800A Pre-approval are the final elements which need to be accomplished to allow Dillon to begin looking for a potential match for us on the Waiting Child list.

What are the documents that go in our Dossier? A Letter of Application to the People’s Republic of China. A copy of our Home Study. A Copy of the Birth Certificate for both parents. A copy of our Marriage License. A Certificate of General Physical Examination for both parents. A Letter of Employment for both parents. A Certificate of Financial Status form. A Police or Sheriff Letter for both parents. A Certification form with a copy of the original USCIS approval (pre-approval) notice attached. Copies of the Photo/Signature Page of the Passport for both parents. Each of these documents must be Certified and/or Notarized, and are time-sensitive (must be dated within the last 4 months or so). Since we had already been working on some of these items, we had virtually everything done by Friday with the exception of my Letter of Employment which, for some unknown reason, takes 3+ days to travel from Tulsa to Owasso via interoffice mail (Argh!). Nevertheless, one way or the other we will have this Letter of Employment by Monday (tomorrow) and Angie will be turning it in to Dillon International tomorrow. Once Dillon receives these documents, they then process them to get translated copies made as well as getting them Certified by the Secretary of State of Oklahoma. At any rate, as of tomorrow, this big step of submitting our final Dossier documents will be completed.

We are hoping that our final Home Study document is completed this week. If so, we will then send it in with our I-800A (Application for Determination of Suitability to Adopt a Child from a Convention Country) application. Once that goes in the mail, we wait a week or two to get a response from CIS (Immigration) informing us of our fingerprint date and time in Oklahoma City, usually a month or so in the future. A week or two after that we will officially receive our Pre-approval to adopt a child. In a nutshell, as of tomorrow when we turn in our dossier documents, the CIS step just outlined is the final piece of the puzzle…..at least until accepting the referral of a child. Once that happens, the paperwork chase begins anew!

On a lighter note…..as you can see below, Cameron played paintball for the first time yesterday and had a blast. The family of a boy in Cammo’s class owns a large paintball facility in Collinsville, OK, and celebrated their son’s birthday there. A good time was had by all.

Cameron is really starting to ask a lot of questions about the second adoption and seems much more accepting and, dare I say, excited about it now. It has taken a lot of reassurance on our part to convince him that he neither needs to feel threatened about his place in the family, nor will he be expected to assume responsibilities toward his sibling that are more appropriately shouldered by the parents. It has taken quite a while to get to this point, but he’s been a trooper about talking and working through his feelings related to this second adoption.

A New Day Dawns

It was little more than a year ago that we returned home from Beijing after completing our adoption of a wonderful little guy named Dang Niu, whose adopted name became Cameron Niu Hamel. The last year has been extremely challenging, yet intensely rewarding, and we have truly been blessed beyond our expectations. Those of you have adopted internationally will know just how loaded, yet accurate that last sentence is.

Ever since Angie and I first discussed the possibility of adopting, we always envisioned two children. After hitting the one year mark following Cameron’s adoption, we had a chance to reflect a bit and decided the time was right to begin the process anew. We emailed a group of 50 or so individuals (family and friends) in mid-August informing them of our plans and, since that time, I have intended to both update the blog and begin posting regularly once again.

Here’s where things stand as of October 3rd……. Since we transferred our original dossier to another agency to complete Cammo’s adoption, we have had a file with Dillon International that we had two years to reactivate, thus saving both time and money with the process. Once we reactivated his file in early August we had to update all of our information (still a rather lengthy process). We completed that about a month ago. Then, we had a series of 4 Home Study sessions to complete spread over a month or so, whereby we met with our Social Worker (Rebecca) both individually and together to go over everything imaginable. Our last Home Study meeting was yesterday. Now it will take Rebecca a couple weeks to write up our Home Study, at which time we will send in a copy along with our I-800 Preapproval application to USCIS (Immigration). Then we will get a letter back from CIS informing us of when our appointment is in Oklahoma City to get fingerprinted. Following that appointment and a week or two wait, we will receive a notice that CIS has preapproved us to adopt a child. We anticipate all of this will be completed sometime around the end of 2010. Until that time, we are just completing paperwork and waiting, but that all changes once we get our Preapproval.

For our second adoption we are on the Special Needs track. This means that we have completed a detailed medical form and spoken at length to our Social Worker about what types of Special Need we are comfortable with in any child we might adopt. China has what is called a Waiting Child List that is updated online about once a month. Dillon representatives will go through this list and, combined with our detailed medical form, information from the Home Study, what they know about us, and much prayer, they will look for a good match. Once they think they may have found a match they will call us with some basic information about the child. If we are still interested, a more complete medical file, photographs and other information is made available to us for several days and, during that time, we can review the file ourselves and/or with medical professionals. If we are still interested, we can accept the child, at which point we begin the arduous process of completing the months-long paperwork process before traveling to bring our new child home. We hope to travel back to China for this second adoption sometime next summer, but this is merely a ballpark timeframe at this point. For now, we wait!

A quick update on the family…….Cammo is now 6 weeks into his first year of school in America. Hard to believe he knew virtually no English a mere 14 months ago, yet is now making all A’s and B’s, including high A’s in both Science and Math, in the third grade at a very rigorous private school. What’s more amazing is that he has aced his first 6 Spelling tests and is one of the top three kids in his class with his AR (advanced reading) status. He still struggles with some specific areas, but is well on his way to adjusting to his new academic environment. He hates homework, but what kid doesn’t??? He continues to take weekly Karate lessons and is still enamored with all things football.

Angie and I are pretty much occupied with our jobs, helping Cammo with schoolwork, and working toward this second adoption. There is very little time for much else!

I will plan to post updates to this blog every week or two now!