Wednesday, June 16, 2010

a fingerprinting appointment!


i went home for lunch today and checked my mailbox, as i have been doing very faithfully lately, and much to my delight i saw 2 pieces of mail from USCIS {US citizenship & immigration services}. woohoo!! i ripped the letters open and saw that we have finally been appointed dates to get fingerprinted. fingerprinting is the last step we need to complete for our US government approval to bring home a "foreign born child" as our own.


however, i noticed that ryan and i have been appointed different days which i thought was kind of strange. ryan's appointment is july 8th and my appointment is july 9th. any other adoptive parents out there have this experience too? i guess i had just pictured us going in at the same time for our fingerprinting like i have seen many other blogging couples do, but oh well! since we can get fingerprinted here locally, it's not really a big deal to me either way...perhaps it's just a missed photo op.

anyways, it's kind of funny because whenever ryan asked me what i wanted for my birthday last week, i kept telling him that i wanted a fingerprinting appointment. i smiled today when i saw that the issue date on our letters was 6/11/2010...my birthday!!

so, where does this leave us with our adoption? well, we haven't heard recently any status updates on our dossier. the last thing we heard was that it had been delivered for authentication in utah on june 7th with our agency's partner. {let me apologize to all you non-adoptive folks but i really can't explain this portion of the process because i don't understand it very well myself. i am just spitting the words out as i hear them and smiling and nodding like i understand :) } at some point, our dossier {huge packet of papers} will leave utah for washington d.c., and then will finally be off to ethiopia. as soon as i find out this has happened, it will definitely be time for celebration!

we are praying for a referral for a child {aka - when we'll be matched with a kiddo, know their name, have a picture, etc} in God's timing, but i'm admittedly not a very patient person. our agency's average referral wait time is 3-6 months. once we receive a referral, we'll be assigned a court date to travel on our first trip to ethiopia. however, ethiopian courts are closed for all of august and september so i'm hoping that won't backlog us too long from getting assigned a court date. i would love to pick up our kiddo in 2010 but that's probably a long shot!

anyways, well that's where we are...waiting! waiting to go to our fingerprinting appointment, waiting to hear that our dossier has moved, waiting for a referral, waiting for a court date, waiting to meet our child, waiting to bring our child home, waiting for our family to grow!!

thanks for your love and support along this journey!

**edit: since i first wrote this, i checked our credit card and it shows fedex charges for sending our dossier to washington d.c. on my birthday as well! praise the Lord!! one step closer to our baby :)

2 comments:

Caroline @ The Feminist Housewife said...

So exciting! Best of luck with everything!!

Tiffany said...

Hi, we are also adopting from Ethiopia and we had fingerprinting appointments on different days. It was a huge hassle because we had to drive two hours away to get it done. At first I didn't have an appointment at all because they changed the form and the scheduler didn't see my name on there. Fun.
We haven't completed our dossier yet because we are moving next week. It's so exciting that you are getting so close!