Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Teravista Garage Sale for Lottie Lee


Adoption Fundraiser

 to help bring Lottie Lee home from China to her forever family here in TX
How can you help? Have items to donate?
Can you help spread to word to local  Austin/Round Rock/Cedar Park family & friends?
Or ready to shop til your drop for a GREAT cause!

Please contact Winn if you can help winncastagno@yahoo.com

Monday, August 13, 2012

DTC-Dossier to China

Getting everything straight in the crazy process of adoption is tough! The adoption process can be broken down into three distinct steps: the home study, dossier, and the post LOA/referral paperwork.  We are officially DTC--Dossier to China!  What does this mean?  Well all of our paperwork, everything we have been working towards since January, is finally sent to China. 

We received our state-certified USCIS I-797/ I800A Approval Notice copy, then we sent it in to the Chinese Consulate in Houston, which was forwarded directly to our agency in STL, which completed our dossier, and then sent on to China. We are now DTC (Dossier to China!)

A few weeks (4-6 weeks) after our dossier arrives in China, it will be logged into the CCAA. The day our paperwork is logged into the system is known as your LID. After our LID, we will wait for a referral, which will include a photo and some medical information about our sweet baby.  The wait depends on so many factors, and there is no definite timeline; but we are closer and closer to Lottie Lee and continue to pray she is happy, healthy and cannot wait to meet our daughter!

Friday, August 10, 2012

We LOVE FedEx

So we decided to send our documents via FedEx, standard overnight, with tracking and email updates to our courier in Houston, and since it made no sense to have the courier send us back the consulate authenticated I-797 Approval Notice, we decided to have it sent directly to our agency in STL from Houston.  

So we mailed out the document on Thursday, August 2nd, and it was received by the courier at 8:30am on Friday August 3rd.  We were not expecting our authenticated document to be sent to STL for at least 2 weeks.  To our SHOCKI we received an e-mail from Fedex at 5:25pm on Thursday, August 9th, that the document was mailed to our agency in STL.  The Chinese authentication process for our final document took less than one week to complete...amazing!  On Friday, our agency confirmed the document was delivered and our Finalized Dossier would be sent to China on Monday August 13th! The email notifications from Fedex are fantastic, and these last few Fedex emails have made my month!

Thursday, August 2, 2012

1 week and we are State Certified..off to Houston

Opened the mailbox and sure enough our state certified copy of our USCIS I-797/I1800A Approval Notice document arrived in one week, on August 1st.  This was perfect  timing for us to send it to our courier service (www.mychinadocs.com) before we left town for the weekend.  The timing couldn't have been more perfect..We are all smiles here at our house!