Woefully behind!

I have been slacking on updating because we have wonderful news - we have been matched with a little boy! We sent our Letter of Application (LOI) on April 14 and it was accepted the same day. Our son turned 1 on April 20 and we had a little birthday party in his honor at our house. Next year we'll be able to celebrate with him and show him the video we took of his celebration this year. We can't wait!

Our official Letter of Approval (LOA) was issued by the Chinese government on May 11, so we've been busy sending more paperwork to our agency and the US government. We are hoping to travel this summer, which will be ahead of the 12-15 months that was originally estimated.

Without further ado, here is our son, "Hank." We cannot wait to meet you, sweet boy!

LID!

We received our Log In Date on March 17 - it was a lucky St. Patrick's Day for us! Since then, we have been reviewing files to see if one of them is our son. We will let you know when we are matched! Thank you to everyone who donated to Lifesong. We met our matching grant and raised enough money to cover most of the fees for filing our dossier, translations, agency fees, etc.! We are hopeful that we will get matched with our son soon.

With anticipation,

The Knueppels

DTC and Safe Arrival!

After months of hard work and paper chasing, we finished our dossier! We sent it to our agency a week ago and it hit some bad weather (I'll admit I was sweating a little), so its arrival was delayed until Monday of this week. Our Social Worker reviewed the documents when they arrived on Monday and sent our dossier to China the same day. We've been tracking its voyage and we received confirmation last night that it had safely arrived in Beijing! Hooray! Now we wait for our log-in date. Once we receive that, we can be matched with our son. :) We are praying, too, that all the paperwork is in order after it is translated and that we don't have to redo anything.

With anticipation,
The Knueppels

Authentications almost complete!

We have been working hard to make sure everything that is needed for our dossier is done so once our authenticated documents come back, we'll be ready to send the complete package to our agency and then they can send it to China! We got another batch of authenticated documents back today! That means we only have 2 documents left and those should be back to us (hopefully) by next week. It's getting real, y'all. We had to compile a bunch of pictures of our family and our house to send with our dossier. They want a minimum of 8 pictures...we put 17 in. We just couldn't decide which ones represented us best and we wanted the Chinese government to get a glimpse of the fun things we get to do as a family (including seeing the Terracotta Warrior Exhibit at the Children's Museum!).

With anticipation,
The Knueppels

Getting the Authentications Completed

I think I may have mentioned before about the mounds of paperwork we've been buried under. We feel like we're slowly digging our way out! All of the documents that are part of our dossier have to be notarized, then they have to be certified by the Secretary of State in the state where they were notarized, then they have to be authenticated by the Chinese Consulate that handles the state where they were notarized and certified. (That's not confusing at all, is it?) All of the documents from Indiana can be authenticated by the Chinese Consulate in Chicago, so we sent those documents off last week and they were received by the Consulate last Friday. We have other documents from TX, AZ, and PA that would each have to go to a separate Consulate, so we made the decision to send those documents to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC using a courier service. Because the documents are going to the Embassy, the State Department has to verify the documents first, then the Embassy can authenticate them. Once the authentications are complete, we can send in our dossier! We are really hoping we can have it sent to China in early March. That will bring us one step closer to being matched with our son!

With anticipation,
The Knueppels

I-800 A approved!

We got a HUGE surprise in the mail yesterday - our I-800A approval notice! In case you weren't keeping track, that was a speedy 5 days after we were fingerprinted. We thought it would take at least 2 weeks for us to hear back. With that good news, we sent off documents to be authenticated by the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C. today and will be sending some more off to the Chinese Consulate in Chicago this week. Our I-800A gave us approval to adopt 2 children, but we don't plan on doing that unless there are a set of twins or siblings that are up for adoption, in which case we would not want to separate them. We are still hoping to send our dossier to China in March, but we know Chinese New Year may delay some of our documents getting processed. We continue to complete paperwork and get our documents to the proper authorities!

With anticipation,
The Knueppels

Fingerprints are done and more documents certified

We survived our USCIS fingerprint appointment today with both kids in tow! They even managed to get my fingers all on the scanner, in spite of my shorter pinky fingers (this caused BIG problems at the local fingerprinting place, for some reason). We got all of our Indiana documents certified by the Secretary of State's office today, so we're hoping to send most of the documents off to be autheticated by the Chinese consulate soon. We are slowly getting there!

With anticipation,
The Knueppels