Checklists

I love lists!  I’m one of those people who would have lists to organize all my lists!  Seriously.  I have grocery lists.  Clean out my purse and you’ll probably find many old crumpled grocery lists from past trips to Walmart and Super Target.  Actually, I just cleaned out my purse and it’s now empty, but there were at least 6 old, scribbled lists, trust me!  I have library book lists for all the books I want to check out for the kids, including a list of children’s books on adoption for my boys to read now and my future daughter to read as she grows up (blog post on this in the near future).  I have lists of all the things we’d like for the house like kitchen floor refinishing, snow blower, water softener, down payment for a minivan.  I have started on lists of things we’ll need for a little girl because let’s face it; the last 7 years have been all about boys and I have nothing pink or girly in my house.  I have Christmas card lists and adoption fundraising lists.  The list of lists is endless.  And I just received 2 more this week.

We have been in contact with our home study social worker she emailed me the checklist for updating our home study:

o   Get fingerprinted for our FBI criminal background checks (this report takes 6-8 weeks)

o   Order all of our background checks from states we have lived in since turning 18 (not costly but time consuming)

o   Update our medical reports for both Jay and I and the boys as well

We have also received our checklist from our adoption agency.  Our agency reviewed our Nepal dossier, contrasted it with what is needed for China and found out that almost every single piece of paperwork needs to be re-done because our Nepal dossier is over 12 months old.  So, we have the following to complete for the dossier:

o   Change our country immigration from Nepal to China via the USCIS (could be a lengthy wait)

o   Purchase new birth certificates and marriage certificates. 

o   Rewrite our employment letters, power of attorney documents, financial worksheet, education and employment history documents

o   Update our Match Form regarding which special needs we’re open to. 

One other thing.  We'll also have a small stack of paperwork to complete for the college kid who lives in our basement.  He's a great guy who works for my husband at church and he needed a quieter place to stay while he finished school.  Because he'll still most likely live here after our home study is complete for China, we need to include him.  So, background checks, fingerprints, et cetera are due for him as well.  Hopefully it won't be a big deal.

Where are we now?  I’ve created a new timeline to the right.  I’ve kept our Nepal timeline way at the bottom just as a reminder of where we’ve been on this loopy journey.  It’s all a part of our story!  But China has its own new timeline in the right column. 

I’ll start tackling the list as quickly as I can but the governmental paperwork is totally out of my hands.  We’d appreciate prayers for a timely paperwork process.  My goal would be to finish everything by Christmas. 

What's in our Dossier -- Part 3

Here we are with the last of our dossier! Okay, it isn't quite the last because we are still awaiting our I-171H form and need to be invited to Omaha for the finger printing appointment for that form to be issued. But this is the last of the bulk mailings we have for the dossier. Included in this mailing were:

• 10 passport size pictures of each adopting parent
• 2 Employment and Educational History Forms
• 2 copies of our home study agency license
• 2 copies of our home study agency non-profit certificate: the 501(C)3
• 2 copies of our home study social worker’s license or credentials
• 2 photocopies of the photo ID/signature page of our passport for each applicant
• 2 sets (12 in each set) of photographs of our home and exterior views from our home.

The home study just needs 2 sections rewritten, but should be on it's way to our agency by now. And thanks to donations by friends and family, that $300 we were waiting on for the Home Study Review Fee ($600 total) has been sent to our agency. God just showed up and dropped these gifts in our lap. Thanks to those of you who have answered the call and served us! We are completely humbled by His provision through your support!

With the dossier almost done, we are trying to raise funds for the Completion of Documents Fee. This fee is $4000 and you can see our ticker at the top of our blog on where we are. We keep receiving little checks here and there and the ticker is creeping forward. Wow! Yes, even a little bit helps! Please be in prayer for these finances. I am still praying that we can remain debt free through 2009. If we can accomplish this phase of fundraising, we will move onto phase 2 which will be an additional $7000 that will be due in January as our paperwork goes overseas!

We hope to hear of news of referrals going out for families on the waiting list. Our agency is confident that the families going before us should be receiving news of their children soon!

What's in our Dossier -- Part 2

Here we are again with another milestone -- the second shipment of paperwork to our agency! This is the second of three mailings we’ll complete and it is comprised of Certified Documents. We had to provide:

· 2 copies of birth certificates for both Jay and I
· 2 copies of birth certificates for both boys
· 2 copies of our marriage license

These all had to be certified copies, not photocopies, and with recent issue dates stamped on them so that they don’t “expire” before being sent to Nepal. This isn’t really a huge feat in and of itself, but the cost of ordering multiple copies of all this stuff added up. Your gifts and donations helped cover these expenses and help keep us debt free to date!

You may recall that in our first mailing last month, we were missing 2 key Notarized Documents for our dossier. Thankfully the first document has now arrived and was also included in today’s shipment. That included:

· 2 copies of our Nebraska State background check for both Jay and I

Our home study is done too! We've seen the rough draft and our agency should be approving it this week. Then we can have that notarized and added to our dossier as well.

Next we move onto section 3 of 3. I have most of these documents done but am waiting to receive Jay's renewed passport. We also expect to be invited (yes, you read that correctly) to Omaha to have our fingerprints taken for our Federal file. When those are taken, we will be issued our I-171H form and we’ll be done with the dossier! We hope these final things will be received within 4 to 6 weeks.

Urgent Prayer Request
Friends you may have read this on Facebook. When our paperwork is done, we will owe the next payment to our agency. The amount due will be $4000. Right now, we have a commitment from a family member to cover a quarter of that cost. Would you please join us in prayer that we will continue to receive financial support from friends and family who have received our support letter? I truly believe that with God’s provision, we can finish 2009 without taking on any loans. Please pray specifically for the $3000 that we’ll need in the next 6 weeks or so.

Shortly following that, there will be an even larger payment due to Nepal as our paperwork goes overseas in December or January. But we’ll take things one step at a time.

If you would like to be a part of the journey, donations are being accepted at our agency! Please mail a check payable to La Vida International along with a note stating it is for the Jay & Brooke Collins adoption from Nepal to:

La Vida International

150 S. Warner Rd. Ste. 144

King of Prussia, PA 19406

Thank you for your continued support! More updates to come as we finish this final section of our dossier.

Seeing the End

Last week on September 11 we remembered the fellow Americans we lost. But this year we found a tremendous reason to celebrate with the arrival of our friend's adopted daughter who came home from Ethiopia! Welcome to the land of the free and the home of the brave, sweet girl! It was an incredible event to witness and we were honored to be allowed to see her when she came off the plane in her daddy's arms. What a vision of God... "a Father to the fatherless."

Seeing the end of the process puts things into perspective and renews our passion for adoption in the midst of paperwork.

We checked more things off our list recently and I haven't written about them -- adoption training courses. We're required to take 2 online courses, totalling about 10 hours of training. Our agency also shipped us a huge file of about 55 articles that they required us to read. Some of the courses and articles would scare anyone with casual interest in adoption. Titles such as Reactive Attachment Disorder, Hepatitis and Other Communicable Diseases, and You're Not My Real Mother, are tough to swallow. The learning is helpful and I'm grateful for it. It gives us more to pray for and more to be prepared for on this adventure. But it does not scare us away! This is the path God has us on and we'll follow Him to the end.

This week we'll put paperwork on hold as we celebrate C's 6th birthday. We'll celebrate at home on his big day and he'll have a party with 8 boys from school and church on Saturday out at a local indoor playpark. We also have his school carnival/fundraiser on Friday night. So, we're a little swamped this week!

Next week we'll send our passports off for renewal and we'll order the final birth certificates and marriage certificates. Once we're done with those things, we won't be done with the dossier per se, but the things we'll be waiting for will be out of our control, so we'll just wait until everything slowly comes in.

One way you could pray for us this week is that our home study social worker would receive Jay's police clearances from the State of Florida. She is also still waiting for our FBI clearances to arrive and she mentioned that those have been backed up for quite some time. So, we'd like to see those come in this week so that the home study can be officially behind us and added to our dossier.

Thanks for checking in and have a great week!

What's in our Dossier - Part One

We had a big accomplishment this week. We finished part 1 of 3 for our Nepal Dossier!

A dossier is a “country application” that consists of all the documents we need in order to adopt a child. Ours comes in the 3 basic parts: Certified Documents, Notarized Documents, and Non-notarized Documents. To a lot of families adopting internationally, the dossier is overwhelming. But if any of you know me, you know that I’m super-detailed, organized and have Administration as one of my top Spiritual Gifts. So, the dossier is not a big deal for me. In fact, if I really sat down to do it, I believe I could have it all done in a month! But I have more to do in life than work on adoption paperwork! And we have a ton of time since our dossier will not even be sent to Nepal until December or January.

Our home study also needs some of the same documents needed for the dossier. So, as we check items off 1 list, we’ve been able to cross it off the second list. Most of the things we crossed off both lists fell under the Notarized Documents section of our dossier, so I completed those first. I believe this was the longest, most detailed, crazy part of our application itself. Here’s a list of what we needed to provide:

* 2 Certificates of Financial Status (income, savings, investments, debts, etc.)
* 2 Medical Certificates for each Adopting Parent (we had physicals and were tested for communicable diseases like TB, HIV, etc.)
* 2 Commitment to Post-Placement Letters (stating we’ll report annually on how our adopted daughter is doing)
* 2 Employment Verification Letters (for Jay, but I included 2 so they know about my part-time wedding coordinating)
* 2 Non-Employment Verification Letters (for me since I’m a stay-at-home mom)
* 2 Specific Powers of Attorney to our Agency (granting them the right to act our behalf on the legalities of the adoption)
* 2 Powers of Attorney from Jay and me and vice versa (granting Jay the right to make adoption decisions on my behalf, and vice versa)

Things that we need to include in the list above but are just waiting on are:

* 3 International Adoption Home Studies (our Social Worker should have this done within the month, I expect)
* 2 State Police Clearance Letters for each Adopting Parent (we ordered these and are just awaiting their arrival)

Thank goodness we have a good friend who is a Notary! All the documents above needed her stamp and signature. We’ve kept her busy!

We will send this first packet of dossier documents to our agency on Tuesday. They will review them all and let us know if anything needs to be altered in any way. Please pray that they are all accepted! The only hiccup we could possibly see is the “attestation clause” on our notarized documents. Some documents our agency gave us had such a clause for our Notary. Others did not. We have heard that the state of Nebraska will require attestation clauses, but our agency is in Pennsylvania and they do not require them. We’ll see! At the very least, it will be an easy change to make and we’ll just have to reprint and have things re-signed. But it would be so nice to have things done and done correctly the very first time!