December adoption update::

We have made huge strides the last couple of months on the adoption front.   We have a completed homestuday.  Well, almost complete.  We are STILL waiting on a couple of states to get our background checks back.  I am not sure which states are still holding out on us but I know that they have been in the works since about Halloween.  I don’t even want to count how many weeks that has been.  Sometimes its better to be left in the dark.

Hopefully soon and by soon I mean tomorrow J we will have all the clearances back and we can move onto the immigration approval.  This is a process in itself.  We will send a copy of our homestudy, and a long form to the USCIS or immigration.  They will then approve or deny us the ability to bring an immigrant into the county.  This process can be long and also includes having to have our fingerprints taken at the USCIS office.  We are hoping that once we send these forms off we can have approval in about 45 days but have been told it may take up to 90 days.  I will be honest, I can’t even imagine how I will feel if we have to wait 3 months for this approval.   After we get our approval from USCIS we will be able to send the rest of our already completed dossier to our placing agency and they will spend about two weeks reviewing and preparing the complete document.  Then it will be on its way to China were we will finally be able to get inline for the matching to a child process.  Right now our agency is saying this will take anywhere from 6-12 months from the time our paperwork gets to China.   We are hoping so badly that it won’t take this long but we are trying to prepare ourselves with the idea that it just may take this long or even longer. 

 

I wanted to share with everyone the amazing looking authentication sticker the Chinese Embassy marked all of our official papers with a few weeks ago.  It is such an amazing site to us as we have been working on gathering and putting all these papers together for about 4 or 5 months.

 

We are excited to be moving on to celebrating the holidays around our house.  Many of our traditions have been disrupted or postponed this year for our homestudy.  It is not the fault of our homestudy but more that I was just preoccupied this year.  So bring on the holidays we are ready to celebrate!!!