After the Giving and Receiving ceremony, your son or daughter is now officially adopted and your child in all contexts of the Vietnamese law. Your life together as a family will begin in Viet Nam, and the time you spend in country will be an extremely memorable experience. Hopefully your adoption agency will take care of all the paperwork and appointments necessary for you all to be able to come home, and you can spend your time bonding and getting to know each other.

If possible, try... more

In continuing on with our detailed posts about each step in the Vietnamese adoption process, we’re now on to the Giving and Receiving. The Giving and Receiving ceremony is one of my favorite aspects of Vietnamese adoptions. It is essentially the giving of a child to their new family. The Giving and Receiving, or G&R as it is often called, is when your child legally becomes your child in the eyes of the Vietnamese government. You will walk away from your G&R ceremony with your child who is now officially adopted.

Giving and Receiving ceremonies vary... more

I am excited to be seeing a couple of places online that have recently been dedicated to letting Viet Nam adoption agencies speak about their practices and on their own behalf. There are now two websites that are tracking adoption agency information and as they continue to grow, will be indispensable resources for anyone thinking about adopting from Viet Nam and researching adoption agencies.

The premise behind these projects is that the site owner contacted every adoption agency that is licensed in Viet Nam with a list of detailed questions. Each agency was informed... more

Last Wednesday the Joint Council on International Children’s Services (JCICS) held a summit to discuss the current and future state of adoptions in Viet Nam. Representatives from several U.S. government offices met with representatives from adoption agencies working in Viet Nam to try and come up with a plan to ensure that adoptions from Viet Nam continue and are done in an ethical manner.

If you are a prospective adoptive parent (PAP,) you have probably already heard from your agency. If you haven’t, you may wish to contact them and get their opinions on how the day went and the topics that were covered. I was extremely pleased to wake... more

The next step in the Viet Nam adoption process is traveling to Viet Nam to adopt your child. Boarding the plane that will ultimately bring you to your child is an amazing experience. But once that euphoria wares off and you have over a dozen hours left in the air, the travel can be a bit grueling, but it doesn’t have to be. Your positive or negative experience will have a lot to do with your airline carrier and the amenities provided to you.

We flew on Thai Air and it was a good trip, for the most part. The one negative was that my husband and I were seated in the middle of a middle row, so to... more

This post is continuing on with our series of Steps in the Viet Nam Adoption Process.

Most adoptive parents share the sentiment that the wait from referral to travel is the hardest part of the entire adoption process. Now that the I600 petition submission policies have changed and that wait time has been extended, there will be many families trying to positively bide their time when they’re feeling completely impatient and fed up inside.

I wish I had some magic secret that I could share that would make this wait easier, but no such thing exists. If it does, someone really needs to share it with all of us here! What helped me was reminding myself that the wait was a means to... more

I feel like I haven’t written a whole lot about Ella lately, so today’s Love Thursday post is all about my no longer a baby, little girl. She truly seems to have grown up in an instant and I am thrilled to have this sweet little toddler as my partner in crime for the day to day running around that we have to do. At 19 months old she has such a personality and I really love spending every day with her. So forgive me if this sounds like a lot of bragging, but I am so proud of her!

Having our social worker over for our home study update and hearing her praise Ella's development... more

Well we had our home visit with our social worker for our home study update this past weekend and it went really well. It was nice to see her again (B did our first home study and Ella’s post placement visit) and nice to get some affirmation about Ella’s growth and adjustment. Although she wasn’t there to check on Ella per se, she still let us know that she was happy with what she saw. This was especially true when Ella would play with her from a bit of a distance, but not hold her hand or get too close.

It was a very relaxed, pretty informal meeting. Before we really started... more

The links that follow this post outline the steps in the Viet Nam adoption process up to this one; and this one is a BIG one! Getting your referral is an amazing, surreal experience that can have a variety of emotional impacts on one’s life.

Things have changed recently in Viet Nam adoptions and child-family matches are now being made by Vietnamese officials instead of the American adoption agencies. Once your paperwork has been processed and approved by the seemingly trillions of people who will pass it along, you will be matched with a child who fits the criteria of child... more

After you have completed steps one through five (see below for links) in the Viet Nam adoption process, you will begin to compile your dossier. Most adoption agencies will advise you to hold off on collecting documents for your dossier as many have expiration dates. Getting documents too early could force you to start over again on them if they do expire; this causes much more of a headache and financial strain than you need this far into the process.

A dossier is the set of documents that will be sent to Viet Nam and essentially be your family’s file for your adoption in country.... more