Submitting Letter of Intent (LOI) - Part 3

*This is part 3, you can make sure you read part 1 and part 2.

After we said YES to the little guy’s file that we reviewed, we had to quickly submit an application to Lifeline in order to be accepted into their China program. Within days we were accepted and matched with a social worker at Lifeline. We’ll call her “Mary” for privacy reasons. Mary called us and welcomed us to the program and then sent us an email with a ton of documents, including our contract with Lifeline. This brought up another interesting issue, however, because we already paid an application to WACAP. While working on our Lifeline paperwork, I needed to clear up with Janie at WACAP about what we should do. Ultimately, we agreed to move our application fee as a donation to WACAP, since the fee was non-refundable. We thought it would be best to help another child get placed in the future. So once that was cleared up, we were ready to fully commit to Lifeline.

Between the contract paperwork and the rest of the home study paperwork, we were SWAMPED! The worst part was all I wanted to do was submit a Letter of Intent (LOI) to China to adopt our little boy. I was so worried that each day we didn’t submit a LOI, was another day China could take away his file, just like they did with "Will". Unfortunately, we had to go through all of the other paperwork first before we could officially submit the LOI.

By the time July 31st came around, we still had not submitted a LOI and it had been almost a month since we knew we wanted to adopt him. My patience was wearing thin and I was getting extremely anxious. I think it was the lack of sleep we were getting from staying up so late doing parent training for our homestudy was finally breaking me. After a few frantic emails back and forth between Mary and the director of the China program at Lifeline, we were finally able to submit LOI on August 3rd and we officially completed our home study document chase on July 31st. It was such a relief submitting that!

At this point, there was not much more to do. We needed to wait for the next steps in the home study process and wait for the Pre-approval from China in response to our LOI. There’s a lot of hurry up and wait in the adoption process!