Can you guess what we were most thankful for this Thanksgiving? If you are friends with me on facebook, you already may have seen this, but if not...we submitted our dossier on November 23rd!!!! Here's the details: we were trying like crazy to get our homestudy done by Monday, November 22nd. In order to internationally adopt, you not only must go to court to adopt them, you must also get the approval of the US government to bring an orphaned child into the country. To do that, you submit an I-600a form, and to submit it, you need a completed homestudy. Prior to 11/23, this form cost $830 (yep, you read that right!) to submit. After 11/23, the price went up by $60. Now I realize $60 is just a drop in the very large, very deep adoption-cost bucket, but still, we were hoping to save it if we could! However, we had to wait on background checks to come back, as well as Griffin's physical, AND we were finishing up our required training. Odds were not good, but we lucked out (and had an awesome social worker who worked very diligently to help us) and got our homestudy done on time! Believe it or not, I picked it up at their office on Monday, November 22nd at 2 pm, took it straight to the post office, and got it postmarked on literally the LAST day before the fee increase! Whew!
And the best part was that the homestudy was the last thing we were waiting on to submit our dossier! So as soon as I dropped Cooper off at preschool Tuesday morning, I made a trip to my local FedEx/Kinko's and copied off the huge stack of papers (aka the last 3 months of my life) that comprised our dossier! I have seen so many people take awesome photos of them handing their dossier over to the clerk, but he was not really very nice and I was pretty sure he would have scoffed at having his picture taken by the crazy lady with a camera, so I resisted the urge! Our dossier was officially sent off to our agency on Tuesday, November 23rd, just two days before Thanksgiving. You better believe that was what I was feeling most blessed by on Thanksgiving day!
Our dossier is currently making its way around the country getting authentications and other stuff that I have no idea what they mean, but I know they get us closer to our baby girl...so I don't really care! We got our receipt letter from USCIS (where we sent that super expensive immigration form) and soon we will get appointments to get biometric fingerprints taken. Once those are done, we will get our official approval to bring an orphan into the country...this is called our I-171H. Some agencies make you wait for this form to submit your dossier, some don't. Ours did not-we just need it to get our babe into the country.
It's a weird, yet good, feeling to be at this point in the process. As a control freak, even though acquiring all the documents and paperwork for the dossier was often a pain, I liked having something to do. With every checkmark I made on our list, I knew we were a little closer. Now, we aren't in control at all. Our part is temporarily done. I'm thrilled to be a huge step closer to bringing her home, but I don't like not having any say in how the rest of this goes. We are enjoying our last months as a family of four-I am very hopeful that this will be our last Christmas without her here, and luckily the Christmas season keeps us plenty busy, so we aren't getting too impatient yet!
Thank you to all who were praying for us and keeping fingers crossed for us as we waited on things to come together over the past few weeks. We are so excited to say that now...we are officially waiting!!!
yay! that's such a great feeling :) congrats and i hope you get a referral for your daughter very soon!!
ReplyDeleteCongratulations!!! We are so proud of you guys! I am waiting with anticipation of our sweet little niece. I love her already!
ReplyDelete