We got our Appointment!

We got our Immigration biometrics appointment today! October 18 is already a day of celebration in my family - my brother-in-laws birthday and my sister's wedding anniversary - but now it's also our appointment day! Once our fingerprints get processed we will be ready for our phone call =) Hopefully it won't take too long to process. I hear they're backlogged but they used to be able to do it in 3-5 weeks.
So once again we wait....

WE'RE WAITING?!?!?!?

So my social worker and I have been e-mailing back and forth about travel vaccinations and what-not when it occurred to me to ask, " When are we officially on the waiting list?" This was her reply!!! : "At this point, you ARE currently on the waiting list. Your materials have been sent and you are waiting to be matched with a birth parent." WHAT?!?!? I thought we'd have more time!! So basically we can be referred any day now but the soonest we'd be able to travel is probably mid-November when the rest of our papers get processed!! Holy Buckets!! ( I should consider renaming my blog "Holy Buckets" as I seem to be saying it quite often during this journey=p)

SOOOO- we are now in Super Duper Fundraiser mode.... We were figuring February at the earliest but we've now been (possibly) bumped up by 3-4 months- Yikes!
We have a couple months to raise funds faster then anticipated but we can do this!! Anyone have fundraising ideas?? We'll be doing a meat raffle and possibly some craigslist sales but with the holidays coming up, I hate to bug people, well I hate bugging people in general, but more so around the holidays =)

As we wait for THE CALL- please pray for us and for our child's Lotak Jinno (birth mother).

On our Way!

Well our papers are on their way anyway! Our social worker has now completed our home study report and we have turned in our dossier materials along with our I-600A. Our fingerprints are on their way to the FBI and hopefully we'll get cleared quickly. We hear it can take 8-10 weeks =( In my mental timeline I'm hoping we get approval from everybody by mid-November. Then we wait... =) I'm hoping to be "paper pregnant" by Thanksgiving!
This all started on the last days of school in June and we're wrapping it up in the first days of school! Time flies when you're paper chasing!

Papers Papers Papers!

So we are doing our Home Study, I-600A and Dossier all at the same time! Normally you do one at a time but we're being considered a "rush" family! =) We are now done getting everything we needed for our I-600A (our petition to the USA to adopt an orphan); I plan to drop it off tomorrow to our social worker. Then on Tuesday we'll hand in our part of the Dossier and of course writing out some BIG checks!
After that we wait.......... we wait for the FBI to approve our prints and we wait for our appointment to get printed AGAIN. And we wait for everyone to look over our stuff and say Yes or No. Then once everyone says "Yes, you can be parents" we officially wait again, but this time for THE CALL. The call that says "We have child waiting for you".

Please pray for us that this is it. Please pray that everyone says yes and we can start that exciting wait - just like a pregnant couple waiting for their child to join their family. And Please Please pray for the scared, worried pregnant woman in the Marshall Island's who is coming to the difficult decision of making a birth plan for her child. I don't know who she is yet, but she is constantly in my thoughts. No, not that she chooses adoption so we can raise her child - but that she is getting the support she needs with this difficult decision that will change her life. I pray that she is turning to her faith in humanity and in God to guide her. I pray that she is safe and accepted and comforted by someone when talking about her decision.
I pray for her because she is after all family, she just doesn't know it yet :)