For a long time we (Rosemary and Mike) have been thinking about adopting a baby from China. After a lot of careful consideration and soul-searching, we finally decided to go ahead with it, and we soon thereafter discovered that bureaucracy knows no national or cultural boundaries. What followed were months of very tedious paperwork, since we had to deal with Illinois DCFS to be licensed as foster parents, the United States INS for visa and citizenship issues, and then everything had to go through the Chinese department in charge of orphans.
Oh, and did I mention we lost track of how many times we were both fingerprinted? Both of us are quite certain we each have exactly the same fingers we started with, but just in case we might have gotten them mixed up by mistake, we had to keep going back and getting our prints taken over and over again. I suppose you can never be too careful about these things.
Preparing the documents that were going to China was a particular trial, since nearly every one had to be signed in front of a notary, then witnessed and stamped by the notary, then taken to the DuPage County offices in Wheaton to be sealed by the county, then taken to the State of Illinois offices in Chicago to be sealed again, and then taken to the Chinese Consulate in Chicago to be sealed yet again. Except for Mike's birth certificate, which had to be sent to the Consulate in New York -- three times -- because he was born in Massachusetts. (Don't ask.) And then they changed the medical forms on us just as we were finishing, so we had to do those all over again. I hate to say it, but it all makes the dreaded 1040 seem easy in comparison.
The only way to maintain one's sanity during this process was to consider it all to be a deliberate test of whether we have the patience and endurance to deal with a small child. Apparently we do, because we finally completed the dossier and filed it with our agency (Sunnyridge Family Center in Wheaton, IL), and they in turn sent it off to Beijing in April 2001.
Then we waited. And waited. And waited.
By early July 2002, everyone else in our dossier group had received a referral, that is a name and a photograph, so they could start making travel plans to go pick up their children. We had not. Instead, the agency called us one morning and told us that China wanted to know if we would consider twins! Well, that possibility had never even occurred to us, but after a couple of days we decided that if that's what life was offering us, maybe that's what we were meant to do. (We also talked to people who had twins, to make sure we weren't overlooking anything crucial. We weren't. We hope. :-) So we said "yes," and then went back to waiting again, with no idea how long it would take. Now that we had said yes to twins, we began to worry that they might be placed with somebody else and we might get "only" one child -- it's amazing how fast one's perspective can change.
Fortunately, it only took a couple weeks before the agency called again and told us the pictures were in. And that, of course, it what you really want to see anyway. They start on the next page.