Moving Along

Things are still progressing! Yesterday I took the disc of our dossier photos down to Wal*Mart and had them printed. I received an email from one of our references yesterday, and she plans to have her letter notarized and in the mail to us today. Today I received an email from another reference, and she plans to have her letter notarized tomorrow. She lives near us, so we are going to just pick it up tomorrow afternoon. That will finish up all the documents for the dossier we need with the exception of the home study. Thursday morning I hope to go into Nashville and have all the Davidson County documents county certified. That should take care of all the county certification too.

I also received an email from our social worker today. She is finishing up the rough draft of our home study and plans to email it to us either Thursday or Friday for review. Hopefully after that, the adoption agency will approve it quickly so that it can be on its way to CIS, and we can get that I-171H quickly!

Our social worker said after she receives approval from WACAP, she will have the final copy notarized and county certified, but she will send it to us for state certification. I'm undecided whether or not I'm going to get all the rest of the documents state certified right away so that WACAP can review them more quickly, or if I should wait on the final copy of the home study and have everything state certified at the same time. I don't really want to have to go into downtown Nashville twice, but I don't want to wait if it slows down the process just a little bit.

More Progress

We're still making progress. Over the weekend we had our passport photos taken for the dossier. Apparently Ethiopia needs these so they can staple them to the corner of our file. We also picked out the rest of the pictures for our dossier. We needed one picture of Ben and me, one of the children who still live at home, one of the front of the house, one of the back of the house and pictures of five different rooms in the house. We couldn't decide on which rooms to use, so we are sending extras and letting the agency decide for us. All that is left now is to get the home study from our social worker and for two of our references to get their letters notarized. Then we can get the rest of the documents county notarized, everything state notarized and everything off to the agency!

Whirlwind

The past six weeks have been a whirlwind. During that time we have sent in our I-600A, been fingerprinted, applied to the adoption agency, completed all the paperwork and been accepted by them, applied to the home study agency, completed all that paperwork, had both home study meetings and have nearly completed our entire dossier. We are now waiting for Ben's birth certificate, two letters of reference and an employment letter from our CPA before we get everything state certified and off to WACAP.

Now we wait on the social worker to complete our home study, and then we wait some more to get CIS approval. Hopefully our social worker will complete our home study quickly, it will get approved by WACAP quickly, and CIS will get us our I-171H without a long wait.

After that we go on the waiting list. We are requesting an infant of either gender 0-12 months, either healthy or with minor special needs. We spoke with a representative from WACAP this week, and she said that since we were open to a boy, we could get a referral within just a month or two of going on the waiting list, and we could travel just two or three months after referral. Whew!