Author: Scott

Originally posted January 30 on our old Vox blog.

If you’d like some more information about the US/Vietnam developments we talked about in our last post, here are a couple of links for you:

• The Joint Council on International Children’s Services’ Vietnam page
• The US Department of State’s Warning Concerning Adoptions from Vietnam
• The US Department of State’s Q&A on Inter-country Adoption Concerns

Enjoy!

Originally posted October 28, 2007 on our old Vox blog.

We got two pieces of good news last week. The first arrived by mail and was titled, “NOTICE OF FAVORABLE DETERMINATION CONCERNING APPLICATION FOR ADVANCE PROCESSING OF ORPHAN PETITION.” Does the federal government know how to write a compelling letter or what? Anyway, we needed that clearance and we got it, so that’s a good thing.

The second piece of good news came from an organization called Life International regarding the Tapestry Adoption Assistance Fund.  We encourage you to read more about the fund via the previous link, because it is such a great thing. We just found out that LI and the Tapestry fund awarded us an interest-free loan to help us pay for part of our remaining adoption expenses. We are grateful to those involved with the fund because of how this will help us in our process.

That’s all the news for now, we’ll report back soon.

Originally posted October 2, 2007 on our old Vox blog.

Emailed from Josh to Scott:

Originally posted April 12, 2007 on our old Vox blog.

First of all, I’m sorry I don’t post more often. It seems that time flies when you’re having fun or when you’re just really busy.

Next, I’m sorry that I temporarily lost our birth certificates, which are necessary when applying for a passport. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to absentmindedly send our original birth certificates and photocopies of said birth certificates to Immigration (Oklahoma City via Dallas). That derailed Annie’s plans of applying for our passports on Good Friday when we were both off of work.

Now we find ourselves with our original birth certificates returned to us along with backup copies we ordered in the mean time. Annie went ahead and did her passport stuff on Monday, leaving me to drop by the post office on my lunch hour someday soon. The 50-page application still looms large, although our physicals went well, which means that part of application is taken care of (about 4 pages worth).

That’s all for now… is a new post coming this weekend? Definitely maybe.

Originally posted April 3, 2007 on our old Vox blog.

Good looking? You betcha. Healthy? We’ll find out on Friday. Part of the 50-pager we are working on involves us getting physicals and our doctor filling out some paperwork. Hopefully he will verify, in his medical opinion, that we are (physically) fit to be parents. Doesn’t that mostly involve giving fake horseback rides and saying “because I said so”? On Friday we will also start the passport application process – so check those things off the list if you are scoring at home.

Also, for further insight into the government, we received notice in the mail that all of the stuff we sent to the USCIS Dallas office has been forwarded to the Oklahoma City office for some reason. Good to know I suppose, but somewhat puzzling. Anyway, that’s the news for now. Thanks for stopping by!

Originally posted March 28, 2007 on our old Vox blog.

Last night we dropped our completed I-600A and a few other documents into the FedEx dropbox bound for the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services office here in Dallas. It turns out that when you plan on bringing someone from another country into your family, and by extension into the U.S., the federal government wants to know about it well in advance. This is understandable, especially considering the fact that we are counting on the federal government to make the child a citizen. Isn’t that nice of our government? We think so, and in light of that we are willing to send them a form, some birth certificates, a marriage license and a couple of money orders for processing and fingerprint checking (it turns out the federal government also wants to run a few background checks on anyone who says they want to bring the aforementioned someone into the country).

At any rate, it feels nice to have that first little chunk of paperwork submitted. At least until they call us and tell us we did something wrong, or a form is missing, or my (Scott’s) handwriting in completely illegible. In the mean time, we’ll gladly turn our attention to whatever is next on the list.

Originally posted March 22, 2007 on our old Vox blog.

Our adoption process is officially underway. It is nice to be able to say that after so many months of thinking and talking about getting started. Early last week we had a phone orientation with our agency, Gladney Center for Adoption. The woman who conducted the orientation was very nice and walked us through the major steps of the process. From this point on, the majority of the paperwork process is initiated by us, so we’ve got a ton of work to do.

The complicated bureaucracy driving the paperwork process became evident to me in two things. First, there is a 53-page orientation manual that comes with the phone orientation. Second, our first step was fill out a 2-page application to our agency. This application isn’t the application, merely the application to receive the application. We received the application via email earlier this week, and as I went to print it off I couldn’t help but marvel at it’s 54 pages.

In the mean time, we we are working on a form and some documentation for Immigration, which seem relatively uncomplicated at this point. We hope to have that stuff submitted by the weekend so that we can focus on getting the 54-pager filled out and submitted to Gladney.

So that is where we are right now, and that is what we are working on. As I mentioned in the Welcome post, we will do our best to keep you posted.