Status

OK...Here's my attempt to get everyone up to speed as to where we are at in the process

In order to go adopt any child, be it international, domestic, family member, etc., you have to go through a homestudy. A lot of people are intimidated by this, but it's a fairly easy process, just very time consuming. As long as you are not a murderer or anything, usually you'll be fine. But a homestudy is basically a report of your whole life history and your ability to raise a child. You have to write a very in depth autobiography, get fingerprinted, criminal background check, medical physical, give details about every financial detail in your life, employment verification, etc. We are just about done with this process. In fact, our social worker is coming out to our house tomorrow to pick up the remaining paperwork that she needs and then she'll type up the report. Hopefully we'll have it by the end up the month.

The next step is getting your dossier together. This basically is a bunch of documents that you have to gather. It includes your homestudy, medical physicals, employment verification forms, marriage license, passport, etc. This is not hard either, just time consuming. These forms have to be made into official documents and it is a rather elaborate process.

• First, all forms have to be notarized.
• Then I have to take them by the secretary of states office to have the state seal applied to them. (Indiana is very nice and does this for free:) )
• Next I have to send them off to the Vietnamese consulate to have the forms authenticated. This is a very easy process as well, however it is VERY expensive. It costs $50/document, and with 10 documents, the cost adds up!

(We are probably half way though this. We are at a point where we just have to kind of wait. We need our passports in order to finish our documents, as well as a final version of our homestudy. Hopefully this gets done pretty quickly, as we need to send it in to Immigration services in order to get fingerprinted for them. Then they send us the last form that we need. Hopefully this gets done pretty quickly.)

Once this is done, we send the dossier off to our adoption agency and they review it to make sure everything is right. Then they send it off to Vietnam to be translated. Then we wait!

Once our dossier is submitted, there will probably be a wait time of 6-9 months for a referral.

Anyway, that is basically where we are at now. Feel free to ask any questions that you may have.

And be on the look out for our next post. I know a lot have people have asked this, and I'm sure a lot of people have thought about it and maybe don't want to ask, but in the next post, I will address how we came to our decision to pursue international adoption.