Home Study NOT complete.

 We had hoped to have our home study in our hands at the end of January.  Alas it is not so.  B’s fingerprints were rejected and I believe that to be the very last thing we need.  Hopefully soon.   We could have gotten them taken sooner, but had a hard time finding a place that would take our fingerprints.  Our town will only taken them at certain times of the week, all when I am working!  And while we did find an alternate place to take them we’ve been pushed back by Burton’s prints being rejected.  We are just waiting for the H.S. to send in our i600a.  Our H.S. ALSO has the originals we need to get out dossier together.

Once our Dossier is together we have some decisions to make.  We can either let the lawyers and our agency (more on that below) know we are ready for a referral, or we can wait until our i600a is approved and then ask for our referral.  What’s the difference?  Time.   If we wait for the i600a then we will have all the paperwork we need through the DRC court hearings and our lawyer can just move through the process.  If we don’t wait for the i600a the lawyer can go through the first two steps of the process but must wait for our i600a to proceed to court.  So it is a gamble.  Will we be ready for court BEFORE the i600a? or will it all come together and we might have a referral earlier than we would have.  Of course there is the resources needed for each step.

We are not there, so we can’t even make the decision yet. We will see where all of it stands after our Dossier is done.

In VERY exciting news our facilitator, DRC Adoption Services, has become a licensed child placing agency!  This smoothes our process considerably and we still get to work with the two amazing women that we feel are the best chance in completing an entirely ethical adoption.

In other news we have a small committed team for running various race lengths on October 12^th.  We hope more of those who have expressed interest will be committing soon as they learn more about their fall schedules.   I’ve also started quilting again.  Hopefully if I can complete this first quilt and still enjoy it I’ll be opening an Etsy store to sell them for funding.  I’ll post some pictures once I have one done.

That is about it on the adoption front over here.  Hopefully I’ll get some more reading in soon and can post some book reviews. 

~M

Changing the goal posts

There has been big news in DRC adoptions over the past week.  The US embassy in Kinshasa has put in place a new procedure requiring a mandatory 3-6 month wait period after I600 approval.  Many adoptive families have been so very close to traveling to pick up their little ones and had the goal posts moved 3-6 months out.  It's heart wrenching.  However, this new process was put in place to ensure ETHICAL adoptions and to stop corruption and child trafficking.  All for a great cause, so hard for those who thought they were so so close.

What does that mean for us?  We don't know yet.  B and I are NOT reconsidering DRC as the country we're adopting from, yet.  It's possible things will change in the next few months / a year and the programs will change enough we cannot move forward, but I don't think it will get there.  I don't think the program will get shut down.  I believe things will get ironed out and adoptive families will start PUSHING their agencies and lawyers to MAKE SURE everything is ethical and documented prior to getting to the 3-6 month wait.  I'm choosing to have hope that this will mean great things for DRC adoptions.

It probably means that the time from referral to brining our new child home will be longer than 6 months.  It will be more like 9-12 months, and that sucks. We will have to see what happens to our time frame once we are ready for referral - and we're at least 2-3 months from that point.

More later :-)  off to work for me.

~M