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 :) 
Congratulations on your new addition. We are an American World family, and we adopted a 6 yr old SN girl this past December. We live not too far from you, and if you have any questions, please contact us.
ReplyDeleteThanks Dear Family!! We would love to get in touch with you guys!! Let us know how we can contact you.
DeleteLeft a message of congrats on the AW yahoo group, but wanted to post here as well! We also adopted two older children, our sons back in June 2010 who were 10 and 5 at the time.
ReplyDeleteAnd in February, we brought home our baby girl from Guizhou province.
Congrats on your referral and I hope your timeline goes quickly, which I would expect it would with your 2009 LID! I hope most of your waiting is now behind you, though once you know your child's and have a photo it is harder.
Blessings and Congratulations,
Leslie
P.S. I have a blog but it is private, but if you'd like to view it, I'm happy to share. Just don't have it on the wide web anymore since we're done adding to our family. I have some posts from our time in Guiyang City back in Feb.
Hey Leslie!!
DeleteI'm so sorry - I thought I had replied to your comment back a few days ago - only to see it never posted.
Yes, we would LOVE to see some of your blog posts from back when you were in Guiyang City. We can't tell you just how excited we are to get over there! :)
Thanks again,
Adam (and Ginny)