Nov. 12th...

Nov 12th is the day that is USCIS gave us an appointment to go get fingerprinted! Thankfully, we only have to go to Oxnard for this as I have read about other families having to drive hours to their assigned destination. After we are printed again, we just wait for our approval paper from USCIS and that should be the last paper we need to be DTE! In the meantime, Ben will be going to get another birth certificate of his, we need to take a couple papers to our county government center to get a second level of certification so that we can later then take those papers to the Secretary of State's office in LA to get them state certified. Oh, and finish up our family photo pages too.. really though, we are so close! Hopefully we will get a DTE date early December!

God continues to prepare us to love our new son. We think about him every day and pray for him and his family. Please pray with us that he knows love and feels the love around him now, that his needs are being met.

Thanks for checking in with us!

And, since posts are really no fun without pictures, here's us at the pumpkin patch! Can't believe there will (God willing) be another head poking out of that wagon next year!

Isaiah's Story

Just came across this posted on another blog. If you have a few minutes, it is a powerful story. I think its about 5 minutes long.

Isaiah's Story from 31Films on Vimeo.

Mailed the I-600A!

Friday morning I took the kids outside and checked in the mailbox and found a big packet from our adoption agency. Our completed homestudy! This is the last piece we needed before we could apply to USCIS. I quickly texted Ben the good news and tried to keep myself from just jumping on the next step of compiling all the documents. (You need to get permission from our government to bring home an internationally adopted child) I have found that working on adoption stuff while the kids are awake is not fair to anyone involved so I waited until naptime. Thankfully we were already having a friend come over for a playdate so that helped with the wait. Once the kids were in bed, I started making sure I had all the documents ready. I looked over the I-600A application and realized I needed to download and print out one more form. However, after working on it for 1 hour, I still could not print that one page. I called another friend in town to see if she could download it- she also had a Mac and it didn't work for her either. I tried a second friend- she was able to download it but didn't have any paper. Not a problem, I had paper and once the kids woke up, I went straight to her house, and my friend graciously gave up her free time during her kid's nap to print out this paper. Thank you Erica! (and Katie too).

Not that I am going to outright imply things, but it does seem like anytime I have adoption stuff to work on, the computer doesn't work right, the fax won't fax, scanner won't scan...etc.. then, the kids wake up and chaos occurs. Everything takes so much longer than it should and it is easy to get discouraged and frustrated. I have read about a lot of other families getting hit with many difficult trials (sickness, family emergencies, car troubles and more) during this adoption process. So, electronic malfunction is very small trial to overcome but it seems to be my main thorn so far during this process.

Anyway, the kids and I took the I-600A to the post office, got a nice sturdy packet to mail everything in and handed it over! Now we need to wait to hear back from USCIS for our biometrics appointment. Thanks for checking in.

"I Saw What I Saw"