DTC!!!

DTC!!! For those not familiar with adoption acronyms - that stands for Dossier to China. That means we finally have all of our official documents completed, notarized, certified, authenticated and sent in a nice thick bundle to China. We have moved from waiting for a review and approval from the US Government to waiting for a complete review and final approval from China. We anticipate this step will take 3-4 months at which point we will receive an LOA - Letter of Acceptance and return an RA - Referral Acceptance to China. Once that is done, we will wait for our TA - Travel Approval to come from China, that takes 2-4 weeks on average. Our actual travel dates will then be determined based on when our agency gets CAs (consulate appointments) for our assigned travel group - probably 1-4 weeks later. Our agency sent our dossier to China on December 23rd which was a wonderful Christmas gift to us. There was a great deal of effort by many people to make that happen. A USCIS officer finally took pity on our long wait and helped us get our approval processed quickly once she had reviewed it. Our social worker stayed up late one night to make changes to our home study and got it out on a fed-ex priority mailing the next day. USCIS sent it back to us priority fed-ex, but it was scheduled to arrive the day of the first winter storm. We didn't find out until it had already been sent that priority delivery in our area is not until the end of the following day. Fed-ex was able to mark our package to be held at their local office and miraculously was able to catch it for us before it got on the truck for the day. We intercepted it when the office opened, drove through the snow to Salem to have it notarized and certified at the Secretary of State and sent it fed-ex to a courier in San Francisco. She had to make two attempts to hand deliver it to the Chinese consulate, but retrieved it Monday and sent it fed-ex to our agency in Virginia. It was supposed to be delivered by 10:30 am, but was delayed four hours due to weather. Despite the delay, our agency China coordinator managed to put it together with the other dossier pieces we had sent the previous week and get it out the door on its way to China before she left that day and the office closed for the rest of the week! It has taken much time and effort. We are very thankful to have our documents on their way!