Smurfy's Blog

Approval of I-171H

We went to CIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) in Oakland to have our fingerprints done for our I600 (Petition to Classify Orphan as an Immediate Relative).

Filing of form I-171H (Notice of Favorable Determination Concerning Application for Advanced Processing of Orphan Petition).

Social Worker visited our home which is part of our homestudy. We showed her our home and had discussions with her individually.

Visited the Napa County Coroner’s office to verify that we have no criminal record.

We went to meet with a counselor in San Rafael area to discuss other paperwork we needed to complete.

It was our first meeting with our social worker in Novato. She is the one who will create our homestudy. The homestudy is pretty much what it is… a home study. We talked about what kind of parents my husband and I will be, which child we want to adopt, our financial situation, our life as a married couple, our other family members, etc. In our homestudy, we mentioned that we wanted to adopt an infant female from the NSN line (non-special needs).

My husband and I needed to get our medical record together that is needed for the adoption and will go into our dossier. On this day, we had our physical examination and had blood tests.

We attended a BAAS mandatory pre-adopt meeting in Mountain View. In the meeting, BAAS discussed in more detail of the adoption process which includes forms we needed to fill out, documents we need to acquire, etc. There were at about 11 couples in this meeting. We all sat in a circle while we listened to one of the BAAS staff explain to us what the forms/documents mean.  Also, there were two families who spoke about their adoption experience.  These families brought their adopted child as well.  The meeting took at least most of our day. I remember feeling overwhelmed with information that day. An Adoption Manual given to us was so massive! It was like at least 3 inches thick! I remember thinking ‘we really have a lot of work ahead of us.’ The manual contained all information we needed to put our dossier together.

That was the first day we had our adoption orientation meeting with BAAS (Bay Area Adoption Service) in San Francisco. In this meeting, we found out who BAAS is, what other countries they offer adoption, fees, homestudy, wait time  and general things we will expect during our adoption process.  At this point, the waiting time for a referral was between 12 – 14 months for expedited Chinese families.