First big adoption step completed!

Yesterday I mailed our Letter of Intent to Adopt and all the associated paperwork to our agency in Utah! The Letter of Intent is new to me. The CCAA (Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs) asks all families who are adopting children with special needs to write this letter to them, detailing the steps they will take to deal with their child's special need, medically, educationally, and otherwise. This is also the family's chance to pour out their hearts and let the CCAA know who they are and how much they want to be given the opportunity to parent this child they have chosen from China. I am not a naturally gushy person, so this was a bit of a challenge to me!

This letter must now be translated and sent to China with a letter from our agency detailing why they think we are the perfect family for Hudson Dean. The CCAA will then look over the letters and (hopefully) send back a preliminary approval to adopt (PA). While we are waiting for our PA, which has been taking 51 days to get back, we will be working on our dossier, including our homestudy, medical exams, and immigration approval. Once we have PA and all the parts of the dossier together, we send those to China and will receive back a logged in date, which is simply the date that all the information was officially entered into CCAA's system. Then we wait even longer to get the much coveted Letter of Acceptance (LOA), which is followed fairly quickly by the Travel Approval (TA). Once we have TA, we then send off to the American Embassy in Guangzhou for our Consulate Appointment (CA). We are actually able to request three different possible weeks for our CA, which is nice. Hopefully we can work around some of John's scheduling difficulties.

Can't wait to check off some of the other items on the adoption checklist!