THE STORK IS SOARING

Dossier completed and mailed to agency for translation. Hurray!

With the sun shining and flying high above the bamboo trees, our Vietnamese stork has begun his journey to Canada. He has a long way to travel (over 7839 miles over land and sea) before he finds himself at our front door step. Carrying with him, our most precious gift; the paperwork containing the proposal of our children. Now that we are considered paper-ready, a proposal could come at any time. Although we are not likely to receive one for quite awhile, I am trying to stay optimistic. Hopeful that our stork is strong, he finds his way to us without delay – is yesterday too soon to ask for?

WORRY FREE, CHICKADEE

Deep breathe. Pour a hot cup of tea and sigh. We are ‘paper ready’ and happy to have the ‘normality’ of our life back. No more running around town for signatures, no more people invading I mean, accessing our family, no more mountain tops of paperwork to fill out. It’s all done.

I will admit that I feel bitter-sweet about where we are at in our journey. I am confident in our decision to adopt two dragonflies and overjoyed that we are done the tedious tasks but I am also feeling this next stage is going to be the most difficult. We are now at the point where we can no longer contribute to the ‘moving forward’ aspect and that’s hard to swallow. The ball is no longer in our court. Helpless to our entrusted agency and the birth country of our children-to-be, all we can do is wait.

A BIRD IN HAND IS WORTH 2 IN THE BUSH

1 year, 2 weeks and 1 day (but who’s counting) since we began our process to adopt, it is now legally official! As of yesterday evening at 7:30pm we finally have our completed Homestudy in hand, signed with approval granted from our practitioner. Out of the 30+ pages of Marris-Walker information overkill, the last and final page states;

As a certified adoption practitioner of Ontario, I hereby approve D. and J. for the trans-cultural, trans-racial international adoption of a healthy Vietnamese twin/sibling group under the age of 3.5 years.

Last night, I slept soundly for the first time in I don’t know when. With this stage completed, we are considered paper ready and on to the next and final task; Compiling our Dossier for Vietnam. A Dossier is a set of legal documents and adoption papers which will include our homestudy package, marriage license, financial statements, health certificates, medicals, passport copies, citizenship information and the list goes on and on. The package is huge and overwhelming but we are almost done and will be sending it off to our agency early next week. Once we here back from the ministry, our agency will have it all translated and sent overseas – this is called DTV (Dossier to Vietnam) Then we wait to be LID (Logged into the Vietnam Directory) Then we wait...and wait and wait some more until our agency gives us "THE CALL" - word that we have been ‘matched’ and that a proposal is on it’s way to us. So exciting...