Counting Down

Okay, I am already starting to over estimate the amount of time that we have been waiting...

So, I decided to find a countdown ticker, which is something that I have seen on other adoption blogs. I looked around, and Lilypie.com seems to have a monolopy on free adoption tickers. All the other websites I found with tickers seemed to be geared toward known time frames. So, I created one (with a cute elephant) at Lilypie and put it at the bottom of the blog. And, as you can see...it has not been very long since our documents arrived in Vietnam (even though it seems like a long time).

Adoptionbuzz.org has broken down the timeframes found in the agreement between the U.S. and Vietnam (there are links to both adoptionbuzz and the agreement to the right in the links list).

The timeline identified in Article 40.1 is 120 days. Article 40 also allows for the period to be prolonged 30 days for police verification. The breakdown is as follows:
7 days for the Department of International Adoptions to review the submitted dossier (Art 42.1).
7 days for the Provincial Ministry of Justice to request the orphanage to begin collecting documents for the child dossier (Art 43.1).
30 days for orphanage to agree to place child for adoption and compile the documents that make-up the child dossier (Art 43.2).
30 days for Provincial Ministry of Justice to review the legality/accuracy of the child dossier (Art 45.1).
30 days for the police offices to verify any unconfirmed information within the child dossier (Art 45.2).
7 days for Department of International Adoptions to review the child dossier and the adoptive parents dossier (Art 46.1).
7 days for the Provincial Ministry of Justice to invite the adoptive parents to travel to Vietnam (Art 47.1).

This would mean that if all is going well, the orphanage is either waiting to find a child for us or is putting together a dossier for a child for us. Of course, there are no guarantees on timeline...

So, while we wait, our agency (as well as friends we know that have adopted) recommended looking at day cares, and getting on waiting lists. We visited our first one on Friday afternoon, and we are on a waiting list...they do not anticipate having any openings until September, so I guess it is good to be on a list...