Dossier is Done!

What a week! Our I-171h came on Monday evening. On Tuesday we had an extra 2 year old boy with us for the day so I did not allow myself to even try to look at what needed to be done to finish the dossier. Wednesday, my dad came down to help me drive with the kids to downtown LA to get two papers state certified. This took MUCH longer than expected and I wasn't allowed to use my phone so I couldn't really check on my dad with the kids. I think I was in that building about 2 hours and I came out to the street to find sweet Grandad changing a #2 diaper of his 3 year old granddaughter through the window of my car. Picture this, the high rises, the street people, the buses, and my dad taking care of business! Thanks Dad! I know you didn't sign up for that :)

Wednesday evening, after the kids were in bed and after a late trip to kinkos to make 3 sets of copies I was busily doing this....

































While Ben was working on this... Our "Family photo pages" intended to show Ethiopia how great our family is- 2 formal family photos, picture of the outside and inside of our house and 4 candid shots. Nice work Ben!



Later that night I discover I needed another paper notarized. So, Thursday morning I pack lots of snacks for the kids and head out to AAA to meet with the notary, back to kinkos to make more copies and then back home to organize everything again. I get an email from our agency with more instructions to find out I put everything in the wrong order. I hurry up and put the kids to nap super early (this was not my finest moment as a mother and I had to ask the kids to forgive me for being so tense with them) then I try to reorganize my papers. I discover I am missing yet another paper... not sure if it is totally important so after a few phone calls with my social worker and emails with our agency we get it straightened out and I get the go ahead to FedEx the Dossier. The kids got up from their nap and I drag them out again- by now I have run out of both cheerios and "circle crackers" and those who know us will know this is a big deal. I have enough "veggie sticks" (not to be confused with real vegetables) and bring those along trying to ignore my guilt of feeding them so many snacks in the same day! Here we are at FedEx around 4:00pm. I asked them at the desk when the cutoff was to send packages to East Coast...4:15! So I quickly package everything while the kids were being such troopers by now! (Or the Veggie Sticks were just too delish to be complaining). There was a line but we made it!











I asked the FedEx man to take a picture of us with our package explaining to him it contained 7 months of hard work for an adoption. Please excuse Maddie's frizzy hair. Poor girl didn't get her hair done that day!


I almost cried as I walked out of FedEx with the kids- I am not sure if it was from sheer relief to be finished or just excitement. It was probably a mix of both. We ended our night with a family dinner at home with Ben and celebrated this moment together.

I-171H is here!

We received our USCIS approval in the mail today! By now, most families have all the paperwork ready to mail off but we kind of got behind during this week of Thanksgiving. The pressure it on to get this finished and we are beyond excited! This form (the I-171H ) came just a little over 2 weeks after we did our biometrics appointment. That is super fast!

There isn't anything I wouldn't do for "Opi" these days. I was actually getting really emotional about it while driving to my biometric (fingerprinting) appointment with USCIS a couple weeks ago. My dad had come down to watch the kids and I was explaining to him how this is our 4th time being fingerprinted and for the mere cost of 836.00. My dad seemed taken back by the high cost of this fingerprinting process and I was amazed how my feelings have changed over these past months. $836 seems like nothing now! I feel like I could give up a lot more to be able to go and get our son and become a family to him. I already have a love growing inside me that is indescribable. Other adoptive families have written about it on their blogs and I would read it and think,'Oh thats so nice" but now it is happening to us! How can we love someone we have never met? How can we give up all our savings for this dear little person? Easy, he will be our son. Just as I would do anything for Maddie and Hudson, I would do it for Opi. If Maddie or Hudson were starving and in a dire situation, what else would I do to bring them back home?

Thanks for checking in! Please pray for us to get our paperwork finished- that we can work with fervor and joy as we wrap this up!

Update from the little FIshers:
One of Maddie's latest favorite words, "Ah Ka Ka" (Africa) and "Opi-Opia" for Ethiopia. Then, Hudson just repeats exactly what Maddie says. She is teaching him a lot of interesting words these days. Maddie can recognize the silhouette of the continent of Africa and will point it out and talk about Opi. Today she told me he is growing in her tummy. We talked the other day how Opi will have grown in another mommy's tummy. Maybe Maddie thought I was talking about her....

Orphan Sunday

Today is Orphan Sunday. Let's ask God how we as Christians can make a difference for the hurting and the fatherless.

True Religion from Christian Alliance for Orphans on Vimeo.

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"