jaysaint Getting it all down on paper…

I’m watching Nat Geo’s Multiples, which is all about twins, triplets and quads. Did you know if you’re left handed there’s one school of thought that says perhaps you had a twin that was reabsorbed in the womb? All I can say about all of that is Neat!

One week and a few days and we’ll be hopping on a plane to Florida to celebrate my mom’s 60th birthday and deliver her brand-new fat cat. I wonder if our fellow passengers feel a disturbance in the force or are seeing some funky tarot cards come up, all having to do with having an unusually yowly flight coming. And yet, I am not concerned enough for them to drive him. So we will all just have to endure.

Last night we had three friends over for a “We win!” dinner. James and Charles had just signed the contract on their new apartment, it was Charles’ birthday, Damon’s birthday was Sunday, Brian was in town to meet with his agent and publisher about his first novel (coming to bookstores near you in April!) and I had shipped off our finalized adoption dossier that very afternoon. What more could we possibly ask for? I made a big, organic salad with my home-made Italian dressing (It’s the best you’ll ever have), linguine with a choice of two sauces (sweet & spicy egg and lemon cream with olives and broccoli), garlic bread and a banana cake with chocolate and chunky peanut butter icing. The icing was interesting. Charles loves peanut butter so I wanted to work that into dessert. But the bakery had nothing peanuty. The cake mixes were no help, the icings were no help. The only thing I could find was a box of microwave peanut butter brownies. And that’s as good as nothing at all. So I bought a banana cake mix and some chocolate frosting. When I got home I threw the frosting in a mixing bowl and then dumped in a few big spoonfuls of chunky peanut butter and then hit it with the mixer. It wasn’t nearly as creamy after that, and it took some careful spreading, but it was delicious.

No better way to start the day than to check Saturday’s mail and find our US Immigration approval waiting for us two weeks ahead of schedule!

We think Damon can make the rounds of notary, clerk of court, secretary of state and Chinese consulate in two to three days. Which means that our paper chase will be over this week and our dossier overnighted to our agency.

Once it reaches the agency here’s what happens:

— It goes into critical review. That’s where they spend a few days to a week combing over every document to make sure they’re all perfect. We’ll really be able to to relax once we pass this phase.
— Translation. It will take about a week for our agency to translate all our documents (there are a lot of them) into Chinese.
— Dossier to China. Our agency will ship the documents to the central adoption authority in Ghuangzhou, China.
— Log In Date. Usually a few weeks after the dossier arrives in China it will be fully reviewed and put in line. The date that it goes into line will be our log in date. That is what will determine when we get the kid. Often China doesn’t send the log in date until a month or more after they get the dossier. So we’ll actually be in line for a few weeks without knowing it.

After that we’ll sit and wait with no news for a year or so, at which point most of our paperwork will have expired and we’ll get to do it all over again.

There’s no way of knowing if or when China will speed up or slow down but current wait times are estimated to be about two years. All we can do is be patient and grateful we got in before the rules changed.