Dossier received in Taiwan! We are officially waiting!

Yay!  We received confirmation that our dossier was received by the orphanage in Taipei yesterday, Oct. 25th.  So we are now OFFICIALLY waiting for our referral! 

Here is our current situation in a nutshell:
The estimated wait time provided by our agency is 10 - 36 months.  So we might receive a referral sometime between August 2010 and October 2012.  Or it may be longer - it is hard to say.  I would say it is extremely unlikely the wait would be shorter than 10 months, but one can always dream, huh?  Our Taiwan baby will be somewhere between 0 - 18 months old at the time of referral. And please keep in mind that once we receive a referral (i.e. we are matched with a baby), it will likely be 4-8 months before we would actually travel to get her.  So we might be home with her sometime between December 2010 and June 2013.  In other words, we really don't know when anything will be happening at this point--we are starting the long wait, and there is nothing further to be done at this point.

I say that, and yet there is a lot I'd like to do over the months we are waiting.  Chris and I would really like to start learning Mandarin Chinese.  I would also like to keep up on this blog and give my family and friends useful information on Taiwan and on adoption.  So please check back occasionally--I'd like to update here about once a week, but we shall see. 

I have added another ticker to the bottom of the blog - this one will be our actual wait for referral.  I'm going to keep the "...since starting our adoption paperwork" because it will be very interesting for us to see just how long it takes us to finally bring our Taiwan baby home--from beginning to end, with all of the bumps included.  Bring it on!!

Dossier to Taiwan!

I confirmed with our agency that our dossier was sent to Taiwan yesterday! Yay! I have a tracking number and I'm keeping tabs on it :) Once the dossier is received by Cathwel, they will notify our agency and we will officially be waiting for a referral!! Yay!!

In other news, the pediatrician last week said that Fox is pretty skinny, and since he's 4 months old now she recommended we supplement his breastfeeding with rice cereal. So Fox is eating "food" now, about once a day :) He's not good about keeping it in his mouth, lol. Here's a picture for your enjoyment.

USCIS approval!!

Big news, YAY! Today we received our I-171H form from the USCIS, approving us to adopt a baby from Taiwan! We are so pleased by the timing--we were told to expect a 30-90 day wait, and it only took 27 days. It isn't often that things move QUICKER than expected in International Adoption!
This is the last item we were waiting on for our dossier, so I made copies and we mailed all of our documents to our agency. Here's a picture of Fox 'helping' us do the paperwork for his little sister :) The timing was truly perfect...we were told that we couldn't submit our dossier to Taiwan until Fox turns 4 months old. Guess what...Fox turns 4 months old THIS SUNDAY. Yep, our agency will likely be receiving our dossier literally a day or two beforehand. I'm not sure how long it'll take for our agency to mail our full dossier to Cathwel, for them to translate the documents, etc. But at this point it is all out of our hands. I'll definitely post each step of the way--I'm hoping it won't be more than a week or two. I can't wait until we can say we are officially WAITING for our referral!!
Just so everyone knows, I do plan on updating this blog during the long wait, so please check back often. I plan on posting more Taiwan Fun Facts and misc adoption information. Plus I'm thinking about doing movie reviews of films that are adoption-friendly (and adoption-UNfriendly). So stay tuned!

USCIS Fingerprinting

Yesterday Chris and I got fingerprinted at the USCIS office! It was actually really quick and easy--much better than I'd anticipated. Now we just have to wait for our approval, and finish up our Dear Birthmother letter and our Photobook (the fun part!).

Final draft of homestudy, and mailed the I-600A

Ah, today I feel pretty accomplished. We received the final draft of our homestudy in the mail (huzzah for having an agency so close that mail arrives the next day!), and after work I mailed our I-600A form (complete with check for $830, certified copies of our birth certificates and marriage license, and notarized copy of our homestudy) to the local US Citizenship and Immigration Services office (it should arrive tomorrow). This is a step I have anticipated doing for probably close to 10 years - ever since I started looking into international adoption - so I find it rather exciting :) Now we have to wait. We were told it could be 30 to 90 days total until we get the approval, although during that waiting period we will be given an appointment to go get fingerprinted. In the meantime we get to work on the other parts of our dossier - mostly pretty simple stuff. I've already started working on our photobook (pretty fun!) and the "Dear Birth Mother Letter," which is a little bit more difficult. I feel the need to make it and the photobook JUST RIGHT, since I know it could actually be influential in the referral process.

In Fox news, he will be 3 months old day after tomorrow! He is sitting on my lap as I type this, babbling like crazy. He is getting SO close to rolling over, too! He's sleeping longer at night, too - he went 6 hours the other night, which was wonderful. Five hours is becoming pretty standard. Here's a picture of him on his new activity gym mat I got on eBay. His head is still pretty gigantic :)

Adoption Info #2 - Including cultural elements

Chris and I definitely intend on including Taiwanese/Chinese cultural items and events in our lives in order to help our future daughter feel more comfortable with her birth culture. We already have a lot of Asian cultural things in our lives, in fact. I thought the following article is quite interesting, as it talks about how having too much "culture" forced down one's throat can be counter-productive.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/08/23/one_overseas_adoptee_explains_parents_embrace_of_the_home_culture_can_have_its_costs/?page=1

I do think that adoptive parents need to really think about what type of culture they want to share with their child. The article really made me think about what it will be like for our daughter to be Taiwanese American. She will never be truly Taiwanese, as she will be raised as an American. But she can be raised to be Taiwanese American, and to be proud of the many influences she has in her life. I don't expect that she will ever be 100% comfortable in Taiwan, but I would love to see her be comfortable being around 2nd or 3rd generation Taiwanese Americans--individuals who are proud of their heritage, but don't try to pretend they aren't American.

Final homestudy visit

Today we had our final homestudy visit with BCS - we actually drove to Topeka (about an hour away) to meet at the office, which was interesting. I think it went rather well, and now we just have to worry about the dossier-compilation looming on the horizon...
Fox was such a good boy! Didn't complain on the drive, nor during the visit--he was awake and cheerful the entire interview. We have such a happy, mellow baby :) Today was also my first day back at work after my maternity leave. It was super hard to leave Fox this morning. Even though I knew he'd be very well taken care of by his daddy (Chris now works from home), it was quite sad to walk out the door and drive away from my baby.