We're moving along.

I hope you’ve all had a wonderful holiday season!!!

I’ve been away too long, bad blogger, no cookie.  We had a computer incident – someone spilled water on our laptop and we were out a computer for about 2 weeks.

By the time we got out new computer in the house and up and running I had gotten out of the habit; so now I’m getting back into it.

We’ve been pretty busy as far as our home study is concerned.  It looks like we’re probably on track to have it completed by the end of January.  The biggest pain in the bum, by far, has been the state police checks- from every state we’ve lived in since we turned 18.  So that is four states for me and three for B.  Two of our state applications were bounced back to our social worker K due to paper work errors.   Not errors we made filling them out mind you!  One state has recently changed forms and we were given the wrong form, and another requires a notary seal on a letter – but there were no instructions to that effect.

There is still a question as to if I require a clearance from Ireland and at this point I’m really hoping not, since it could delay K having all the paperwork by WEEKS.   There seems to a question of if international checks are required if your stay was over five years prior vs. within the last 5 years.   DRC doesn’t require it, but our home study has to be up to CT standards.

We’ve gathered the vast majority of the paperwork and are all set for our home visits.  The first is on January 7^th.  Which means I’ll be a crazy person cleaning and organizing all next week.  Our second visit will be for a week later.  I’m a bit nervous for the visits…..  All we have left to finish is 5 hours of adoption training. 

After the home study is complete we then submit out I600a to USCIS.  The I600a is a pre-approval form the US government for our family to adopt a child internationally.   They make sure we meet US standards.  Once we have a referral for a child and go through the process in DRC we will submit a I600 to classify that child as an immediate relative.

You can kind of think of the I600a and the I600 as the US bookends to the DRC adoption process.  The I600a will take 6-12 weeks to be approved.  While we would love to go through all the steps as quickly as possible, honestly we wouldn’t mind the I600 taking the 12 weeks.  It will give us more time to save for our referral, and we have some major saving and fundraising to do!

So that is where we are in the adoption process.  I plan on a blog post catching you up on our lives since Thanksgiving and a Christmas re-cap tomorrow.  We’ve been reading books on adoptive parenting and the Congo from the Library as well and I’m planning on doing a book review a week as well.  Doing a review a week will not only give me some good subject matter for the blog but also give me a goal for my reading!

~M