Had a thought...

I had a thought after the last post that maybe some of you were wondering why I had not posted a picture of our girl because we do have some pics and a video that were in her file we received from the agency.

The Chinese adoption process involved many steps.  And you cannot post any pics publicly until you get to a certain step.  I will try to break the steps down a little bit.

1.  We applied to an adoption agency we found online that works with expats living in China

2.  We were approved so we started putting together our dossier.  The dossier has things like birth certificate, marriage license, adoption petition, physicals, pictures, police reports, fingerprints, immigration approvals, etc...Most people refer to this part of the process as the "paper chase"

3.  All of this paperwork has to be "authenticated".  All of the paperwork needs to be sent to the agency. It then gets notarized and after it is all notarized it needs to be certified by the Chinese Embassy.  This process takes about a month or more.  Usually we would have to do this on our own, but because we live in China the agency did it for us....for an extra fee of course ;o)

4.  Once all the paper work is authenticated our dossier is complete and it can be send to be China to be logged in.  Once we get your Log in Date (LID) we could officially be matched through our agency

5.  Once we matched ourselves with a child (another story) rather the agency matching us we then submitted a Letter of Intent (LOI) letting China know that we want to adopt that specific child.

6.  Once China receives our LOI we will receive a pre-approval (PA).  That is China's acknowledgement that they received our LOI

7.  At this point we can post pics wherever we want ;o)

8.  Then we get a Letter of Acceptance (LOA) That is when we can start making travel arrangements to pick up our girl.   

Since we live in China hopefully that should help speed up the travel portion because we do not need to wait to be approved for Visas and such.

So that is why there is not picture of Chu Chu yet.  Oh yeah, Chu Chu is her Chinese name. We will probably use it as nickname because we like it. ;o)  So on this blog I will refer to her as Chu Chu.  We already have a western name as well for her, but because I have privacy paranoid issues about the internet at times ;o)  I do not want to put her name out into the blogosphere.  I am kooky like that. ;o)

Stay Tuned!  We should be able to post pics soon!