We are on!

So here we are April 23rd and we are #23 on the boys list. If feels so good to be on the list and done with the majority of the paperwork phase. We have been told to still expect 6-7 months before referral, and while I know that I will be impatient at times, I think overall I'll be okay with having this amount of time to get ready for being a mommy of two.

A post for my faithful blog checkers

We got an email from Julie two hours ago saying she got our final correction for the dossier. She said she would process it and then add us to the waiting list and then give us a call to let us know our number. This has been the longest two hours!! I have been putting off taking a shower because I don't want to miss her call. The wait is killing me, but I'm just so glad that we will be on the list TODAY!!! I can hardly believe it. Now those of you who are reading this can wait in suspense with me :) I'll post as soon as I know! Here is a chalk drawing my daughter and I did today representing our guess. It is not really an educated guess, but we'll see how close we come. Also, here is a pic of all our dossier documents, I tired posting them last week but it wouldn't work.

Progress...

So we have two of the three dossier corrections done and sent, we are just waiting on one more. Hopefully next week we will get to see what number we are????

GREAT NEWS!

Oh how the Lord has provided...

So a few bits of business before the good news. We sent off our dossier last Friday as I had hoped and it made it to Portland safe and sound on Monday. We have three corrections to make, but they should be relatively easy to take care of. So once those are corrected it will be off to D.C. to be authenticated. Next is our USCIS, we heard from them yesterday and they said we needed to send in a copy of our marriage cert. which I didn't realize. So we sent that off today and it should be there tomorrow. This is good news because it means they are processing our file. So all this is good news, but the best news of all is...

As soon as we get our paperwork corrections done (hopefully this week) we get to be put on the waiting list! This was a huge surprise for us since we were expecting to have to wait several more months until we got our FDL letter back from USCIS. Our agency decided that since their Ethiopia program has grown there is enough time between submitting of a dossier and referral time that they can put us on the list right away and we wont really risk not having approval on time. For those of you not familiar with the process this is still probably confusing, but over all it just means we will get our little guy referred to us much more quickly now.

Small Speed Bump

Okay, so we didn't get our dossier off the other day like I was hoping due to some minor concerns with the homestudy. Fortunately they were not a big deal and will not affect us so we can go ahead and send our dossier tomorrow...at least I hope to get it off. We heard some good news about the USCIS finger printing appointment timeline. Our other ET adoptive family here in town just got their finger printing appointment for 3 1/2 weeks after they submitted their forms. This may not seem super fast, but I was expecting much longer. The wait time may still be long when it comes to the FDL letter, but we will see. If it takes us about the same time that would put us getting finger printed around the 1st or 2nd of May. That's about all the new updates for now except that I have sold 3 of my fundraiser scrapbooks, yeah thanks guys!

Our packet is off to USCIS!

We got our finished and notarized homestudy today. I sent off our forms to USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration) which will "pre-approve" us to have our little guy become a US citizen when we return home. I have a feeling this will be a fairly long process for us. I talked with my homestudy case worker today and she said that the person who had been processing the files for years just retired and they replaced him with a new girl who has had NO training. Go figure that this would happen just before we sent in our application! I will try to be patient through this process, but I just want to be a number on the wait list soon. I guess in each stage we have to have something to be praying about, so this is our big mountain to be moved now. Quick and thorough processing of our I600a and dossier. While we might have to wait a while for our Fingerprinting and FDL from USCIS, we can still send in our dossier!! YAY! I am so excited about this part. We will officially move into the "dossiers in office" stage tomorrow when I send it off. It would have been today, but I have to make two more copies of our homestudy first. What a relief to have this part done!

There have been more and more families popping up around us who are adopting from ET. I just heard about another family an hour south of us who is using AGCI also-how fun. I got to have a meeting with a lactation specialist today who is going to help me and another adoptive mom prepare to nurse our kiddos if possible. This would be so great in order to boost the health of our babies. Well, that about sums up our progress. When we hear about a finger printing appointment we will let you know.

Answer to prayer!

The words of one of my favorite worship songs seems to fit well for today:
"Every blessing you pour out I'll turn back to praise..."

Guess what we got back today?! Our FBI clearances!!! I can't believe that they came back so quickly. Our prayer has been that since we didn't know about those until the very end that they would not hold up our process, and they didn't! Now all we have to do is get all the corrections made and send the HS back in for approval, yeah! I am so excited this morning, God is so good. I can't wait to send off our dossier, and then 1600a!

Corrections

It seems as though our homestudy has been reviewed since our social worker emailed us today with a ton more questions and paperwork to do. Since our HS interviews were conducted at the same time that AGCI received Hauge accreditation we had to go back and fill in some of the new requirements. None of it seems too hard to get done, and we should still have the corrections done before our FBI check comes back. All should be well especially once we clear up the fact that my husband was not in the military, which I think she wrote in our HS that he was! Apparently our social worker keeps getting us (mostly my husband) confused with another family she is currently working with. This has made it a little interesting. I'm praying that mid-April we be done with this whole part and move on to waiting for a fingerprinting date and FDL (favorable determination letter). For those of you who are not familiar with all the adoption jargon you can visit our FAQs page and see the process and definitions there. Our homestudy social worker said that one family waited 4 months for a fingerprinting appointment! That would mean four more months before we even got on the waiting list. I just pray that doesn't happen. One of the other ET adoptive families here in town wants to help me set up a network of ET families here in the state. It would be so fun to have this little group since there are not any populations of Ethiopian-Americans close to us. Any tips on how to connect or form organized groups would be great!