China Adoption - the inportant steps

We thought it might be interesting to some of you to know how the whole China adoption thing works...what the steps are, and where we are in the process. Perhaps that will make it more interesting as we get closer to "A Day" (allocation day). This post will be long (but then so is the whole process!!), but stick with me....

Firstly, we needed to go through our Government process, which works like this:

1. Submit initial application (it took us over 3 years to be able to do this because initially we had not been married long enough, and then once we HAD been married long enough they had stopped accepting applications!).
2. Establish your eligibility (medicals, references, police checks, financial checks etc)
3. Attend education days (2 full days of education about adoption and adoption-related issues)
4. Completle post-education "homework" and a life story book for your child. Our post-education "homework" was hughe (it has since been cut down). In total, our homework weighed 1.5kgs...all of this weight being stuff we had had to write!
5. Undergo assessment by an adoption contract worker. For us, this meant 5x3 hour visits over 3 months. It was painful...at first we were nervous but after a few hours we just became exasperated by how long our contact worker was taking. She no longer conducts assessments (Hmmm, wonder why?)
6. Adoption Contract worker writes a report which is then reviewed by the adoption department, and goes to an adoption panel (well, it used to - apparently this has changed now).
7. The adoption department then notify you of your approval to adopt.
8. Wait until 5 other couples are also approved to adopt from China, and then get placed in a "batch" with them
9. All "batch" members then prepare the paperwork, certified copies of documents, medicals, letters, financials, fingerprints etc for China
10. Once everyone submits all their paperwork, dossiers are then translated, authenticated, notorised and courierd to China

This then marks the end of the Australian part of the process, and the beginning of the Chinese part of the process. We attempted to begin this process in later 2001, but could not continue because we had been married for only a few months (you have to be married for 2 years according to our government's rules...other states have different rules). We then attempted to start the process again on the day of our second wedding anniversary...but by this stage the government had closed the books and were not accepting any more applications for an indefinate period of time.

Finally, in late September 2004 the government decided to accept adoption applications for 8 weeks only. We submitted our application on November 3rd, 2004. Our dossier was then sent to China on the 28th February, 2006. We were lucky - ours was a fast processing through the system - due in no small part to us being on the phone to the department every week!!

Coming soon....the China process :-)

T and P xx