Next Steps

The big question everyone keeps asking us is "When will you travel to bring Cameron Home?"  We know the remaining steps in the process and the approximate time that each of these steps take so the best we can do is guess...

Right now we are waiting for our  Letter of Acceptance from the Chinese government..  Most websites out there say it takes 1 - 3 months to get your LOA.  Our agency told us we should get it in 1 - 2 months.  We hope they are right.  We have been waiting almost a month and this is the longest of our remaining steps in the process, so we should be almost half-way there.

After we get LOA we send our I800 form to the USCIS.  The I800 is the petition to classify an adoptee as an immediate relative.  They well send us a I800 approval in about 3 weeks.  Once we get our I800 approval the USCIS will send our approval to the National Visa Center who will then forward it along to the US Consulate in Guangzhou China.  The consulate will then send us an approval of our Visa petition.  This process should take around 3 weeks.

Once we get our NVC letter, we sign it and return it to our agency, their employees in China will drop the letter off as the US Embassy in Guangzhou.  Who will then issue our Article 5 is a pre-approval for immigrant Visa.  Our agency will then have the article 5 sent to the China Center for Adoption Affairs.  This step should tale 2- 3 weeks.

The final step in the process is Travel Approval which we should get 2 - 4 weeks after the CCAA gets our Article 5.  Once we get travel approval our agency will book our flights and hotels which should happen 4 - 6 weeks after we get Travel Approval.

Seems like a lot of steps but it should seem pretty speedy compared to our two and a half year wait to adopt Grace.  Based on the above, if everything goes as planned, we should be able to travel in early to mid fall.  We were really hoping to travel this summer so we don't have to take Grace out of school for 2+ weeks but that probably isn't going to happen. 

Keep your finger crossed for us that we don't hit any major slowdowns this time around.