Lagniappe and Shaking

No news on the adoption. Getting the silent treatment until our dossier is reviewed by CARA and we get NOC

SHAKE

Just in case you missed it the LA area had a small shaker yesterday. Not much damage but of course the "news" had to blow it way out of proportion. It was first thought to be a 5.8 but was later downgraded to a 5.4. From the quakes that I have been through unless it is 6.0 or greater they really don't do too much damage. as for figuring out scales…

Earthquake magnitude is a logarithmic measure of earthquake size. In simple terms, this means that at the same distance from the earthquake, the shaking will be 10 times as large during a magnitude 5 earthquake as during a magnitude 4 earthquake. The total amount of energy released by the earthquake, however, goes up by a factor of 32. Check out this for the latest quakes.

LAGNIAPPE

I didn't bring lunch yesterday so I walked to a Japanese place down the road. They have a great chicken teriyaki and veggie bowl, $5.36 out the door with extra ginger. A teenager was there counting out scrunched up dollars and spare change. What was wanted was $5.36 and what was on hand was exactly $5. I asked if she really wanted the bowl as I highly recommend it. A quick nod was what I got but she said she would get the bowl with no veggies. Can't have that, I said, get the bowl and here is the change you need. I then walked out. 20 steps down the sidewalk there was a commotion going on. One guy was acting like he had been stung by a bee. Literally jumped out of his seat and hopped 5 feet into the parking lot. I almost spilled my drink taking it in. I stopped and then noted the slight rolling motion. Ah earthquake, rolling not hard hitting, nothing big, keep it moving. Neophytes acting like they never experienced an earthquake before!

The wife was Jonesing for a pizza from Catalano's. It is a hole in the wall place in Long Beach. We have been going there for about 10 years or so. We have been in a habit of calling it Dave's (who is the owner) rather than by its proper name. This does sometimes get us into trouble when we don't have a menu at home and are looking for the phone number to call in an order. Case in point I told the wife to phone it in and I would pick it up on the way home. They have a very limited delivery range and they are definitely not in the neighbourhood. By the way they are not listed in the yellow pages under Dave. Maybe I should add them to the phone list…The past few times that we have been in Dave was either out on a run or had gone home for a break. When I got there he was there too. I said hello and that I would be right back as I had pics of the phamily. I showed him the eldest child the youngest child and said and this QT pie is waiting for us in India. He knew about the problems we had getting the first child going and knew that adoption was in our vocabulary. He was speechless when he saw our newest child. I feel as though I have robbed Dave as he said this pie was on the house.

Random act of kindness.

je

Road Blocks

Sleeping Constables (speed bumps for you yanks)

Ok so up until this point I have tried to keep emotion out of the blog and instead give you a sense of what hoops you will jump through to do an out of state and international adoption. This may seem disjointed as you do not have all the details of what has happened to date but my cup runneth over and this is vent time. I really like our Adoption Agency. We spent a lot of time back-grounding them, finding out where they live and even meeting a the chief big wig for a protracted breakfast meeting. Unfortunately our latest handler is just not as quick and on top of things as our other representatives.

Last month I got that yellow package from The Agency that had more forms and paperwork to gather for our trip. One of the key items is the Visa. As I stated before it is all done on-line. The only thing missing are passport photos. I sent a quick email to our handler to let them know that I was going to drop the application in the mail. Wow, I actually got a response. Don't mail it yet, it might expire before you go. Huh?? We are going in October right? – that is 3 months away and the visa is good for 6. Why are you saying we won't be going for more than 6 months from NOW? What is the hold up? According to the calculations we were on-track. Well did you see the e-mail about the timeline? Yep NOC/ Court Clearance/ICPC GO! According to what The Agency has told us, and you are a representative of said Agency, we should be getting the call to go sometime in October. Well, the NOC process hasn't started yet! WHAT?? You told us that as soon as we got the Dossier over to India that it would go tot eh NOC board. Yeah but… great here come the excuses… due to the needed updated material it was decided to not go to NOC blah, blah, blah, …we just gave it to CARA for NOC review Blah, blah, blah. All I get are excuses. You know Mr. Agency it would have been helpful if you had COMMINUCATED this to us earlier. Mr. Agency has not been forthcoming nor very helpful in keeping us in the loop. Did I mention that this is our 4^th handler? So I tried to pin them down on a new rough estimate based on their past experience of adoptions in India. Obviously when to start the clock got us hung up.

NOC clearance:

The non-objection clearance (NOC, I defined it before but who knows if you remember it) has been on the slow side. This clearance comes from CARA in Delhi for the child to be approved to be adopted by your family.

Start 01JUL08 complete 23SEP08 (assume 12 weeks could be more)

Court clearance:

After the NOC clearance the paperwork with attorneys head over to the Indian Courts. This takes anywhere from 6-9 weeks after NOC for court to clear.

Start 23SEP08 complete 25NOV08

The court papers are then translated from Hindi to English and sent to The Agency which is not in the state of California. Time: 2-3 weeks

start 25NOV08 complete 09DEC08

Crossing State Lines:

Oh no, you want to work with an agency that is not licensed in the state of California. You do know that inter-state bureaucracy just adds time? Now you have more papers that need to be filled, supposedly this is done without our involvement but do you think they will be on top of the game. Any chance of getting them prefilled? Based on past experience I doubt it. It is not that tough as all my docs for American Embassy in India are already prefilled and I passed them off to The Agency for review). I doubt The Agency will prefill the forms but will instead wait until they actually have the court papers in hand. Well that will add a day or two to the delay. Interstate trafficking involves an ICPC,

Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children:

An interstate compact, or agreement, that has been enacted into law by all 50 states in the United States, and the District of Columbia, which controls the lawful movement of children from one state to another for the purposes of adoption. Both the originating state, where the child is born, and the receiving state, where the adoptive parents live and where the adoption of the child will take place, must approve the child's movement in writing before the child can legally leave the originating state. This Compact regulates the interstate movement of both foster children and adoptive children.

Start 16DEC2008 complete 6JAN2009 (Estimated time frame)

Did you notice that they conveniently left out a week? Hey what are you guys going to be doing from the 9^th to the 16^th? Oh that's right Christmas shopping.

Once the IPC is completed and The Agency confirms that our daughter has a passport then we will be allowed to travel. It looks like I have to ask them to make sure that that gets started when the Indian court complete their business.

What Next?

I have been told that adopting is a test of patience. I think I am getting "D". You can read it in the tone of this posting. It could have been raised had our handler been a better communicator. It is not due to a lack on our part as when ever we have a question we send it up and usually get a response a 1 to 3 days later. But that is just the problem the only time we hear from our handler is when we initiate it. Based on no info we think everything was on schedule and on plan. Our previous handlers did not act this way and when they did not hear from us in a week, as we were getting our dossier together they would drop us a line to see what our progress was.

What next? – gotta pull out some of USCIS documentation. Some of it has expiration dates on it. Miss a date and you have to apply $700 or so more again. Depending on the form you may be able to get an extension. Fingerprints have a definitive drop dead date – no extension. Cha‑ching close to $200 for that. No way around that hit.

Is there a Silver Lining?

Nope. Maybe. Well she won't be here for Christmas so I don't have to buy her any Christmas gifts. She will miss all the crush of humanity and festivities that happen during that time. Then again India has some rather large festive holidays, not sure if our daughter gets to partake in any of them – I doubt it. In either case a whole bunch of strange relatives will not be trying to paw at her. And it gives us time to defend her against her relatives, one of which has taken to calling her "That girl from India". Yes this a very, very, close relative who knows that she already has a name and in fact was named before we even started the adoption process. SHIELDS UP! We remind them that that is our daughter they are talking about and she has a name to please use it. And finally, "Daddy's Little Tax Deduction", Google that one, will not be on this years taxes.

The wife says that airfares should be low because it will be after the holiday season. I hope the fares drop but I doubt they will.

Summary

• Visa – On hold until 4 months after we have received NOC
• USCIS Form I-600A once you submit this and all the paperwork the USCIS sends back form I-171H. Form I-171H is valid for 18 months from the date of completion of advanced processing (valid until Jun 2009). Form I-600 (sign it at the American Embassy with child in possession) must be accepted before June 2009.
• USCIS Finger Prints – expire November 9^th , CHA-CHING, would have been nice if The Agency told us up front to expect to pay for fingerprinting 2x.

je