The Paperchase and L I D

After 4 months of "paperchasing", our dossier was finally sent over to China. "Paperchase" is the term used to refer to the mountains of paper/documentation that you have to collect in order to do an international adoption. Birth certificates, marriage certificates, police and FBI fingerprint checks, child abuse checks . . . the list goes on and on. Each piece of paper needs to be notarized, county notarized, state authenticated, and then sent off to the Embassy to be stamped. Since we have lived in so many states over the past few years, we had a very difficult "chase"! We also had to have a social worker do a Home Study on our family. The social worker met with us several times, checked our house, talked with us about international adoption, etc. and finally wrote up a big report - the Home Study. Once everything was done, all of the papers were bound up together, sent to China, translated, and logged in with the CCAA - the China Center of Adoption Affairs. This was the big day - our LID - or Log In Date was April 28, 2006.