Welcome to Post-Adoption Land!

Congratulations!  You’re home with your little one!

Take some time to rest from your trip, visit with family and friends, and most important, enjoy spending lots of time with your newest addition to your family!

Then when you’ve given yourself a few weeks to settle in, you can, as my uncle was fond of saying, begin to commence to start to get ready for the next step.

Remember that completing all of your post-adoption paperwork is rather like the old Indian saying, “How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.”  It is not possible, nor advisable, to do everything at once.  Your CWA Post-Adoption Team will help you eat this elephant over the course of the next year or so.

So, pass the ketchup and let’s start nibbling on this elephant!

First, you'll need to determine the visa with which your child entered the U.S.  Look in your child’s foreign passport and look specifically at the visa page.  It will tell you whether your child entered the U.S. on an IR-3, IH-3, IR-4, or IH-4 visa.  Almost everything you do from here on out will be based on the visa type.