PA Arrived!!!

July 20, 2012

Let me start off by saying that PA doesn't stand for Papa (my Dad's nickname with the kids). LOL :)

The PA stands for Pre-Approval, which is the first official notice from the China Centre of Adoption Affairs offices that they've received our EA (electronic application) for our daughter and have approved us to go to the next stages. This is a fairly standard approval that comes in typically 2-3 weeks after a family submits their EA... ours came in 9 days!! Woohoo!! Praise God!!

The next two stages of approvals that we are awaiting are:

• Referral Acceptance (RA) - this is China's official approval for us to adopt our daughter. This is the big approval that has been building for us for years!! Back during the spring and summer of 2008, Ginny and I spent countless hours chasing down all sorts of documents - getting official copies of documents - getting those copies notarized - getting those notarized copies certified from the Sec. of State from Texas - and then finally getting those certified copies officially authenticated by the nice folks down at the Chinese consulate in downtown Houston.
• Travel Approvals (TA) - this is the final set of approvals that we will need before traveling to China. This is when we find out our travel itinerary and our official travel dates.

Generally, the RA comes about 3-8 weeks after a family submits their EA, so we are anxiously waiting for ours to come in hopefully the next week or two!! But since we've officially cleared the first approval level, we felt that we could finally share a little bit about our Chinese daughter.

Her name is 金果 or Jin Guo (pronounced Jingwa), and she is almost 7 years old. Several of our Chinese friends and colleagues have told me that her name translates to mean "Golden Fruit" or meaning precious! She has been in the orphanage now for almost 2 years. She is from Guiyang City in the providence of Guizhou, which is in the southwestern part of China. Her official referral picture is shown here on the right. As you can tell - we fell in love right away :)

Our first entry - better late than never

July 16, 2012

This is our first post to a blog that we created several years ago when we first started our journey to bring our Chinese daughter home. I guess what's weird about this is that now we do have something to post about.

After we had Austin, which was a another journey itself, both Ginny and I came to the same conclusion: we wanted an older child that would fit in with our family. Since we had Ryan (10) and Ashlyn (7), we decided we wanted someone who would fit in between Ashlyn and Austin's ages. We had also decided before that we would consider an adoption through the waiting child program since the timeframe for bringing home a little girl via the traditional "healthy child" track was increasing every month. When we began this journey, the wait time from log in date to referral was about 34 months. Today, it's over 60 months and increasing each month. Using one of the online calculators for China adoptions based on log in date, we would have expected a referral sometime in the middle of 2019!!

So, back to our story... Back a week ago Friday (July 6), I received a phone call from our family coordinator at America World Adoption (our agency). She said that she had found a recent referral file that mostly matched our requests. I agreed to look over the file with Ginny and to try to find some doctor within the United States to review her medical information over the weekend. By the time Monday arrived, we were so anxious to lay claim to her file on the shared referral system. This meant that we had 72 hours to do all the doctor checks, make a decision, and file all the necessary electronic paperwork in order for us to accept the referral.

We're so happy to say that last week Wednesday (July 11), we did just that, and thus started the process of bringing our daughter Mia home.

The next step in this phase is to await China's approval of our acceptance of the referral (also called the PA or pre-approval). This comes approximately 2 weeks after we submit the EA (electronic acceptance). After that, we will receive the official approval (RA - referral approval), which then starts the process of obtaining the necessary approvals for travel over to China, which will likely be sometime in the late fall (October/November). Once we obtain our PA and RA, we will post some more information regarding Mia and her background.