I am disobedient

Well yesterday I did what I was told not to do by our home study agency but told to do by everybody else in the adoption world; I mailed our I600-A to USCIS without our home study. This paperwork is for us to get permission from homeland security to bring an orphan, or in our case orphans, into the U.S.A. They have to have your home study report before they can give you the form you need for your dossier,which is called I171-H, but they don't need it to make the appointment for your fingerprints, and since that appt. can take up to 4 weeks to make I figured I would go ahead and send in what we can to get our fingerprinting appt. and get that out of the way. I'm hoping that we will have our approval from DCFS by the time we get our fingerprinting appt., that would be like the cherry on top:)

So one more step closer to sending in our dossier. I have all but my employer letter, our home study agency's license and the I171-H (which is what we get from sending in the I600-A to USCIS) to be finished with our dossier. I'm so ready to be done with the paperchasing. Once we get the above three documents we then need to get them notarized then state authenticated and then we can get them sent to our placement agency to do the next step which is get it to Ethiopia so we can get on the waiting list. There is still a lot of time before that will happen, but it is still exciting. I figured that if everything goes the way it is supposed to with no hang-ups we will hopefully be traveling or getting ready to travel this time next year. WOW!! Fingers and toes crossed;)

Hooray!!!

So we got our home study report today and it is corrected and ready to be sent to DCFS. It will be sent either today or Monday depending on when Mike is able to get it signed by the director of ICM. It feels so good to know that this part of the process is done. Now all we have to wait on is DCFS to write of referral for adoption, which means that the state of IL has to okay us to adopt an orphan. Once we receive that letter then we will send it to the USCIS (Homeland Security) to approve us to bring an orphan into the U.S. Once we receive the appropriate paperwork from them then we can send in our dossier and be a waiting family. YEAH!!! But first things first, we have to get past DCFS, it can take up to 4 weeks or more to get the letter from them. So we wait. Adoption is full of waiting. I am not a patient person but I think I will have to become one, which will only help me with the joys of parenthood. Okay so many prayers that DCFS will get us the referral letter in record time!

FRUSTRATION

That is what I am feeling and have been feeling for quite awhile now. Our home study report is still not done. Our S.W. sent us an email with the finished home study report for us to look over on July 14th but it was missing pages, he said he would get if fixed and that he would get it to us by Mon. (20th) or Tues. (21st). We did not receive it yesterday and have not yet received it today. I am trying to be patient with him since he is so new and we were his guinea pigs but I am starting to greatly lose my patience every minute that I don't see an email from him. Matt, who is pretty darn patient, is even getting frustrated. After we do the corrections on the h.s. it is then sent to our placement agency for them to okay it, then it is sent to DCFS and they have to write a letter saying that we are approved to receive a referral to adopt, which can take up to 4 weeks. Then we send the h.s. plus other paperwork to USCIS for approval to bring an orphan into the U.S. and that can take another 4 weeks or more. We cannot get on the waiting list for a referral until all of that is done. THIS IS WHY I AM SOOO FRUSTRATED!! Please pray that we get our home study soon.

Update

I spoke with Mike, our social worker, yesterday and he said that he should have our home study finished next week. Finally. This step is very frustrating because this waiting doesn't bring us to a referral like the next big wait we still have in store for us. That waiting is the one I am ready for. I am ready for all the paperchasing to be over with and to be waiting on a referral for our children. I am ready for our next step in this journey. And now finally we are getting closer to be at that next step. Now we have to wait DCFS to approve our home study and then wait for USCIS to approve us to bring orphans into this country. There are a lot of people in this process that have their hands in us having a family. So hopefully next week we will be one step closer to our babies.

Still alive

Just wanted to post so that you all knew that we are still here. So far nothing new has happened. We are still waiting on our home study to be typed up so that we can review it and make sure everything looks kosher before it goes to DCFS for them to approve. We did just get back after a week in Las Vegas. We saw Wayne Brady; who was brilliant and sooo funny we were crying, we saw Cirque Du Soleil's Mystere; also brilliant and amazing what people are able to do with their bodies, and we saw the musical The Lion King; I loved it Matt was on the edge about it (he doesn't really care for musicals) but was not upset that we went and saw it. All in all we had a fabulous time but we were ready to come home and rest. This was our last hoorah as a couple with no kids and we are sooo glad we were able to do it. We have no pictures because my camera was not working very well though, which really sucks. Hopefully the next time I post we will have more news regarding our adoption.

New Agency

Well we have decided to go through a different agency for our adoption. This will in no way stall our progress so far. We only changed our placement agency and since we haven't gotten our home study completely finished we are still on the same timeline as before. We have also decided to request for two children, siblings, a boy and a girl, 0-6 months old, in other words twins. We feel this is way that God wants us to go. This is the only new news we have right now, as soon as something else happens I will let you know.

Some reasons why we chose Ethiopia

-1 in 10 children die before their 1st birthday

- 1 in 6 children die before their 5th birthday

- 44% of children in Ethiopia is under fifteen

-60% of children in Ethiopia are stunted due to malnutrition

-The median age in Ethiopia is 18 years

-1.5 million people are infected with AIDS (6th highest in the world)

-720,000 children have been orphaned by AIDS alone

-Per capita, Ethiopia receives less aid than any country in Africa

-Half of the children in Ethiopia will never attend school, 88% will never attend secondary school

-Ethiopia has approximately 4.3 million orphans and the country is twice the size of Texas

-Ethiopia's doctor to child ratio is 1 to 24,000

I got these specific statistics from another blog, but Matt and I learned of them when we were researching countries. We are not adopting a child from Ethiopia to save them, but we did choose Ethiopia partly because of the above mentioned.

Home Study Update

Well we had what sounds like our last Home Study meeting last night. We also got to meet our new social worker Mike, who is great. We are not by any means done with our actual Home Study, we still have a lot of paperwork to do. We are going to be getting some questions from Mike that we need to answer in regards to our marriage and then he will start typing it up, atleast that's what it sounded like to me last night at our meeting. Connie, our original social worker, is retiring on April 24th so she wants to be able to show Mike how to type it up and all that good stuff that the social workers have to do. So we are one step closer to turning in our Dossier!!

we have another home study meeting

I just found out we have our 2nd home study meeting on Tuesday April 7th. YEAH!!! Prayers that everything goes well. We will be having at our house again, so my weekend will consist in cleaning and more cleaning. Atleast this time they will not be walking around our house. So I only have to clean what they will see, which won't be that bad. The only hard thing is keeping things cleaned with two black dirty dogs and white carpet and tile. It is worth all the scrubbing and vacuuming though.