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"

Mega Yard Sale

The week prior to this sale we kept picking up donations from our friend's houses and while others dropped stuff off at our house. We soon had a fine collection of treasures stuffed in our garage, our side yard and our backyard. I felt like a mega hoarder! Here we are the night before the big sale.

Ben and I woke up a little after 5am and with the help of my parents, we drug everything out front until it looked like this! I wish I had more shots of the sale but of course we were running around crazy the entire morning. I started doing "fill a bag for 5 dollars" for the clothing which seemed to motivate a few brave people to sift through the clothes that were no longer sorted and just heaped up on the big tarp.

Katie = super helper! Came the day before and through bribes of cookies and pizza stayed through dinner helping me sort stuff in the garage. She braved the heat and stuffy garage while being pregnant with her 2nd child. She earned those cookies! Thank you so much Katie!

I meant to take pictures of all the people we knew who stopped by to support us but only managed to take one. So here's Amy and Andrew! Thank you to everyone who stopped by. Some of you translated Spanish, helped with sales, hung out to keep us company, and even bought stuff! Thank you for all your help and support. We are so grateful to everyone who helped by donating their things to make this sale a success.

Grand total = $750 !!!!!

So where are we in the process now?

We just wrapped up our last meeting with our social worker (also did livescan fingerprinting for the THIRD time... just writing this for our memories as this probably doesn't make sense to the general reader). We should have that homestudy report soon and will be applying to USCIS (our country's immigration) to be able to bring home an orphan. We will get another fingerprinting appointment from USCIS to do yet another background check and then should receive our approval from USCIS and then send all our paperwork (our dossier) on towards Ethiopia. At that point we will be considered "DTE" or "Dossier To Ethiopia" and wait 4-6 months for a referral of a child. Our official referral age will be between 4-15 months old. At that point we would accept the referral and be ready to travel to Ethiopia as soon as 2 weeks later to attend court there and meet our son! So, this could potentially be happening this spring sometime unless we get held up at some point along the way.

Soon to be middle child...

Don't want to leave out our sweet son! Here is is allowing Maddie to show him how to feed her doll. He is going to be a great big bro!

Progress... Livescans complete!

For those who didn't know, we have been waiting for our homestudy agency to get a certain

"number" that they use to run their background checks on us. We tried the route of getting our backgrounds done independently but discovered that won't work and all we could do is wait. We were notified last week that they got their "number" and we went in and did a second Livescan and we are headed towards being finished with our homestudy now. One more meeting next week and we should have that golden report necessary for progressing to the next steps! Rejoicing in this!

Taking good care of her "Opi" doll

Maddie talks about "Opi" every day these days. She tells us how she is going to rock him and hold him and that he is "soo cute and soo little" Here are a couple pictures of her pretending with her doll. We hope she won't be too disappointed if he turns out to be quite larger than her doll!