Checking the "Yes" Box

Yesterday we met with our adoption practitioner (i.e. social worker) to formally accept Elan as our daughter! (Yes, you can actually tick a box that says “we refuse the proposed adoption. As if!)!

The process involved updating our home study with an “Acceptance of Child” report for the Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services and signing a “Letter of Seeking Confirmation from Adopter” for the China Centre of Adoption Affairs (CCAA). We will be returning all of these documents to our agency today who will then submit them to the appropriate government body. And then we wait for our travel advisory from China! Yay!

On the travel front we were disappointed to learn that we will not be traveling to Suixi to meet our daughter and see the people and place where she spent the first year of her life. Instead, Elan will be brought to us in the capital of Guangdong Province, Guanzhou. Guangdong Province requires that adoptive families spend a week and a half in the province (more paperwork) so we are hoping that during that time we will receive permission to visit the county of Suixi as well as her orphanage and finding spot. We have been able to find a few pictures of her orphanage on the Internet. The play room looks clean and bright!

We’ll know more about when we leave for China sometime in September, when our agency will hold a travel meeting for us and the one other family we will be traveling to China with. We’ll make a smaller than normal group on the ground! (This is because the CCAA batches files by log in date (LID) not by agency. In the latest round of referrals from the CCAA only ourselves and one other family (also of Chinese heritage) fell within their LID cut-off for this round.)