As most of you know it has been an incredibly long wait. Adoption is like that sometimes, unfortunately.

We sent our first application on July 6, 2004. That was an application to be allowed to apply in Denmark. This is necessary when you live outside of Denmark. We got that approval on July 27, 2004.

Then we started getting the papers together for the first proper application in Denmark, the so-called phase 1 application (The adoptions process is split into 3 phases in the Danish system. Phase 1 is sort of the general approval, phase 2 is adoption courses and phase 3 is the specific approval, when the start digging into a lot more private stuff).

The phase 1 applications was sent off on September 1, 2004. In early October of that year we got a letter back with a lot of extra question for clarification. The most troublesome of those was that the wanted to know if the French authorities would accept an adoption made according to Danish rules. We started asking around and each level of authorities in France answered that they could not see why that should be a problem, but to be absolutely sure please go to the next level. We thus got intimate knowledge of all the levels of French bureaucracy from the local Mairie all the way to the French foreign ministry in Paris. It turned out that it was really a non-question as both Denmark and France are signatories to the Hague Convention on international adoption, so there really was no problem. But this took us almost 2 months to find out!!

In early January 2005 we finally got our phase 1 approval and we immediately signed up for the phase 2 adoption courses. The earliest we could get on a course was in early April, so we ended up attending our two weekends of phase 2 courses at Kalø Vig near Aarhus, Denmark in early April and early May of 2005. The very next day after the last course we applied to start the process for phase 3.

The long pregnancy!

Phase 3 usually involves home visits, but when you live abroad they call you in for interviews at their office instead. So we had to go to Copenhagen for 2 days of almost 6 hours of interviews each day. We did this in early July. All went well and we got our final approval from Denmark at the middle of August.

By this time we had already started collecting papers for China but again living outside of Denmark made it quite a lot more cumbersome. We needed to involve the authorities of no less than 4 countries as well as an international organization. And all this needed to be translated into Danish since the Chinese expect the application from Denmark to be in Danish and they then translate it to Chinese.

We had all the paper ready to send off on October 1, 2005 and after they arrived with AC (our adoption agency) they had a few final legalizations to take care off before they sent it all of to Chine. Our papers arrived in China on November 22 and were register by the CCAA (China Central Adoption Agency) on November 28, 2005. This log-in date (LID) is crucial as it determines when you get your child.

From then onwards it was just waiting and waiting and waiting...........

Until 4 October 2007 when we finally got our referral.