We celebrated tonight!

All weekend we prepared for our social worker for our home study to visit our home today. As usual our social worker for our home study is great, real easy-going. The morning began with me waking up before everyone and not being able to go back to sleep, so I started getting breakfast ready for our visit. Finally, I heard Lawson waking up, so I went to get him and the day began; soon after we were all up and going.

Then the phone rang it was our social worker, she almost forgot we had an appointment. When we scheduled it, we were both in the middle of something else, so I can understand. So she was just confirming the appointment and checking if it would be okay to bring her 3 girls with her. Of course I didn't care; our house is kid friendly, there are plenty of toys to entertain and we did not want to cancel the appointment. Rescheduling the appointment wouldn't happen until July because our schedule is so busy until then.

The visit was about an hour, just after she arrived, we ate breakfast while discussing a few things such as the final home study processing, what our community is like, etc,. After that we showed her all around the house and that was it. Nothing to it. I really enjoyed the home study process and am looking forward to reading the report. We will get the report in approximately 3 weeks. Lets pray for a quick return, in other words shorter than 3 weeks.

It felt so good to have this part our the process completed, at least on our end; so we celebrated by going out to dinner. Our next celebration will be when we get our I-171-H form back from USCIS.

So what's next: we are going to fax our dossier documents to our agency to have them check them for errors, etc. When they are complete I will get all our notarized documents authenticated and sealed.

This was a big day for us and we are so excited that things are going so well.

The First Set of Tears!

The adoption process is amazing experience with both joys and disappointments. Monday I shed my first set of tears related to the adoption. Rudy and I have been working really hard collecting all the documents for the home study, USCIS, and the dossier. Now that we are almost finished I called my agency to figure out one of the forms for USCIS. Well little did I know this form can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months to get back. That sent me over the edge. Lately I have been pushing us along to get things done so we can get on the referral list, in other words I want the paperwork to be in Ethiopia and I want to be waiting for our little girl to be matched with her family. I know the referral is going to take awhile since the adoptions in Ethiopia are slowing down, but I just want my paperwork to be their, and I want to be on "The List for a Girl from Ethiopia" NOW!!!

Rudy was great when I called him at work on Monday while the boys were napping to tell him this news. Of course he could tell right away that I was upset. We both thought we were going to get our dossier in Ethiopia sooner than we are. Now I am just praying that we can get our dossier in to be processed in Ethiopia before the government shuts down for 3 months (August-October) and that they get enough rain to keep the office open full time.

In the meantime we have scheduled our last home study visit, which will take place at our house on Tuesday. When we are done with this visit our caseworker can write her report and we can hopefully submit our documents to USCIS, etc. Our caseworker has a family and job that keeps her very busy, hopefully she will be able to get the report done quickly; she has already been so great at accommodating our schedules. I will keep you posted on how this goes.

Finally, the last bit of news, we are so excited friends of ours are going to pick up their little girl in Ethiopia this week. We can't wait to meet her.

Paperwork, Paperwork, Paperwork!!!

We are almost done with our home study. We have been working hard at collecting several of the documents needed for the home study and on Friday March 16, 2008 Rudy and I had our individual appointments with our caseworker. As usual I had no idea what to expect and was nervous while I was driving to her house. The meeting was a piece of cake. It lasted an hour, the first half I gave her all the documents Rudy and I had been collecting for her, and the second half she just asked me to elaborate on some of the questions I had completed for my personal profile, and finally we discussed how we are going to handle becoming a transracial family. Rudy's meeting was identical except that I had already given her all the documents, so his was even shorter.

We are now waiting for our FBI cards to come back, by then we should have the last few documents needed to have our final home study meeting at our house; which means we will be working hard to prepare our house for this visit. Hopefully around that time we will also be getting ready to finish up our USCIS and Dossier paperwork.

Other exciting news: While we have been working on our paperwork several of our friends have travelled to Ethiopia to pick up there child or children, and several are getting ready to travel. Please keep all of us in the adoption process in your prayers.

What have we been doing????

Well we have been slowly working on gathering all of our documents for the adoption. For those of you whose are not familiar with the process there are three main groups of documents. These include documents for your (1) Home study, (2) USCIS, and (3) Dossier. Rudy and I have been working on collecting documents for all three of these at the same time but primarily placing our focus on the home study.

We have just finished completing our personal profilesf for the homestudy. This was 15 pages of questions about you, your spouse, your childhood, adoption, etc. Some questions included: Describe your personality, How did your parents teach you to be self-reliant, describe how you and your spouse met and dated, and What is your present participation in an organized religous setting. As you can see some the questions were pretty easy and straight forward and others were more thought provoking.

Some of the other types of documents and tasks we have been working on include:
--> requesting all the 911 calls from our residences for the past 5 years which includes Georgia and Texas for us
--> Getting out GBI fingerprinting and we need to go back because we misunderstood that we could do our FBI fingerprinting at the same time.
--> We have doctors appointments next week.

We plan to have all our homestudy documents collected by the end of April and hopefully all other documents by the end of May.

This is what we have been....what have you been up to?

I have NO Birth Certificate!!!

Since we started the adoption process started we have been throwing everyone for a loop. Every consultant we have talked with has told us we are going to need certified copies of our birth certificates. My response to there requests is that I do NOT have a Birth Certificate!! There response is us usually what, then what do you have and why do you not have a birth certificate?

This is how I have responded to this question my entire life: I was adopted from Bogota, Colombia when I was an infant. I was born in April and my parents travelled during the summer to bring me home. We flew home on August 28th. My mother asked immigration if and when I would get a birth certificate, and they told her all I was going to get was this birth data card and that would be all I ever needed. Ha...what did they know. My birth data card has my name, date of birth, where I was born, and sex.

Two weeks ago, my home study caseworker asked me to call NY to see if I could find a birth certificate. I was fairly certain that one was not going to turn up, but I did as she requested. I call all over NY state. Long story short, I was finally connected to the international adoption vital records department. They explained to me was that in the 70's the US was not issuing or keeping track of international adoption births. It was not until the 80's that that there was a requirement to keep track and issue birth certificates if the child was readopted in US.

So I will never have a birth certificate....How weird and how normal for me.

Disaster!!!

The morning started really early with the pounding rain and the howling of the wind outside. I didn't realize how much damage there was until our babysitter was an hour late because of traffic due to the down trees blocking the streets. Luckily Rudy and I were planning on going out to breakfast before we met with our caseworker for our home study. While we were waiting for our babysitter to show up I decided to call the preschool I wanted to register Lawson for. They had in house registration on Monday and I was planning on standing on line at 4:30 am to get him registered on Wednesday. Well they filled up in house and told me if I wanted to get on a waiting list I could sign up at 6:00 am tomorrow, but there is already an in house waiting list. In other words, I was not going to get him into the preschool I wanted.

I was panicked. The morning was a disaster!!! The babysitter was an hour late, Rudy and I could not go to breakfast together, I couldn't get Lawson into the preschool I wanted, and now we were suppose to go meet our caseworker. I was convinced it was going to be a disaster too. But to our surprise our caseworker for our home study was really nice. We had our orientation meeting at her house which lasted approximately an hour. We went over the policies and procedures, documents we need to collect, the number to times we need to meet with her, etc.

We will meet with her again individually after we are done with our personal profiles. The personal profiles is 16 pages of questions all about you. Some are easy such as where did you go to high school, other are more thought provoking such as, how did your parents teach you to be self-reliant. After we both meet with her individually and she has all our paperwork she will visit our home. So everything went really well, it was not the disaster I thought it was going to be. I am starting to feel more relaxed about the home study.

Our first phone call

On Tuesday February 19th we called our social worker and scheduled our first appointment with her. After the phone converstaton I got very excited and starred working really hard to get together the paperwork we already have as well as ordering other documents. As usual I am trying to organize and label everything and Rudy laughs at my organization but at the same time is very appreciative. We are really excited about starting the home study, and are counting down the day until next Tuesday.