Clear as mud

First, for those of you disappointed with all these boring words, I promise the next post will contain cute pictures of David. And now I will bore you with more adoption abbreviations. If you want to know why we don't know when we'll be leaving for China, here you go...

LSC -- We are currently waiting for our LSC (letter seeking confirmation, aka LOA or letter of approval). This letter is a huge step. It indicates that after reviewing our dossier, the CCAA approves us to adopt Max. The review process could take 2-3 months.

I-800 -- Here is where things are a little more involved than last time, and at this point I'm a bit fuzzy on the details. Once we receive our LSC, we have to file our I-800 (not to be confused with the I-800A from the paperchase) with USCIS. The I-800 is our petition to adopt Max specifically (where the I-800A was a request to adopt a child from China in general). Supposedly, it takes about 2-3 weeks for I-800 approval which is then cabled to the NVC (National Visa Center).

NVC letter -- After the NVC receives our I-800 approval, they will send us a letter a few days or weeks later saying so. We then send a copy of this letter and a visa application to our adoption agency who forwards it on to Guangzhou.

Article 5 -- We then wait to receive our article 5, which indicates Max will be granted a visa to enter the US. Again, this usually takes about 2 weeks

TA (travel approval) -- When we have our article 5, our agency sends it to Beijing where they will FINALLY issue our travel approval about 2-4 weeks later.

Once we receive TA, finally finally finally, our adoption agency can set our appointment at the US consulate and Guangzhou which determines our travel dates which are usually within a month of our travel approval date, but once again who knows? If this makes any sense to any of you, please feel free to explain it to me.