This is a guest blog post.
I’m the husband that is grateful for my wife that keeps you all up to
date with this blog on a regular basis.
She is phenomenal at doing each post and I’m good at proofreading if I’m
around when she is about to post it – and that’s all I can take credit for.
I have had the pleasure of doing some of the immigration
paperwork as well as the visa applications for our passports. China is quite strict with accounting for who
is coming and going and what is causing this movement.
The Canadian immigration paperwork is done in two
phases. The first phase was completed
almost a year ago (oops – I was supposed to do a guest post on that
process). The short version is that I
filled out about 20 pages of online documents filling in all of our personal
information from addresses to finances to family details and throughout those
documents referred to our son as “unknown child” with ****-**-** as his
birthdate. This was all done with the
help of women that has adopted two girls from China and has helped numerous
families with this complicated paperwork.
The second phase of that paperwork will be completed in
Beijing during the second week of our trip after all of the official adoption
paperwork has been completed. Fingers
crossed that all the immigration paperwork is done properly so that upon our
return to the airport in Toronto, the immigration officers will simply say, “Welcome
home” to us and “Welcome to Canada” to our son.
Then there were the Chinese visas for our passports. As I said, the Chinese government likes to
closely monitor who is going in and out of their country. We were warned that when filling out the
application for our visas that we really needed to be meticulous in following
the instructions and to be sure to include all the necessary
documentation. Each of our applications
was four pages in length and included typical personal information, passport
information, place of employment, family information on children, parents and
spouse, reason for travel, flight details, hotel information for our stay in
China and all the information about the Chinese adoption organization that we
are working with.
The closest visa office is in downtown Toronto (2 hours East
of where we live) and because we needed all the specifics of our trip to apply,
we really didn’t have the time to mail in our application. With only three weeks until our trip, I drove
the three applications down to the Toronto office. My appointment was at 9:00am and I made it no
problem. By 10:00am I was finishing the
third and final application. All the
supporting documentation was in order and the last thing to check were that the
signatures on our applications matched the signatures on our passports. One of the signatures (I won’t say which one
to protect my wife’s identity) didn’t match enough to pass. “So you won’t accept the applications because
those signatures don’t match?” They needed an original document so there wasn’t
another option aside from driving home to get another signature and driving
back. My lovely wife met me part way to
save me some time to ensure I could make it back to Toronto in time to get it
all sorted out. I realized that day,
that I’m not cut out to be in the driving business. When I got home around 7:00pm, I was ready
for bed. I’m heading back to Toronto in a few days to
pick up our passports and that is one of the final things off the list in
preparation for our trip – aside from packing.
