Home Study and Fingerprinting.....Done!

Our home study is DONE! Our social worker made a visit to our home on Feb 29th. She took a tour of our home, asked if we had a fire extinguisher and smoke detectors (we have nine!) and then we sat down and visited about the next steps. She told us to go ahead and make an appointment with the INS office. This is all done online, I found out that we could go in the following week. So our social worker was so kind to complete the last part of her home study documents and have it ready for us to pick up to take to our INS appt.


Our home study is like a book about us! It covers everything on what our parents and siblings are like, description of our home, parenting skills and even what our financial status is. We use this home study report a few times to submit with the paperwork. We had to have an approved home study to be able to apply with the INS.


Its officially been 8 days since we made our visit to the Department of Homeland Security. It was an interesting experience. I didn't even know we had an office like this in Kansas City, and it was surprisingly close to Johns office..probably less than one mile! The process took less than an hour. We had made an appointment a week before that. After we went through security, our appointment with the INS was actually at a little window! We turned in our documents and application and then were told to wait in line for fingerprinting. Fingerprinting is digital now, so we didn't leave with messy fingers!


We are excited to get our form back from the INS. This will complete EVERYTHING we need to send off in our Dossier to Ethiopia. This could take anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 months! From what I am hearing that right now its taking about a month. So the quicker this little paper comes the quicker we will be on our way to Ethiopia to pick up our little girl!

YEP! That's right, we decided to ask for a girl. Originally we were going to leave it open. John really wanted a girl, I was leaning towards a boy. But for some reason, every time I would picture us with our child, I would see a girl! So, the night before the home study was complete, we called our social worker and asked if we could change it. It was no problem!


Other news....our "little brother" Lucas was promoted to a yellow belt in his Judo class. We are very proud of him!! He started Judo just a few months ago, and he is doing so well. We take Lucas to Judo each week, we are hoping to take him to a tournament in the near future. Here are some photos of Lucas during his promotion ceremony.

Homestudy

So we are moving right along......so far John and I have completed 3 out of 4 homestudy visits. We were interviewed seperatly and as a couple. The last one is scheduled a week from this Friday!! Our social worker will make a visit to our home. Hopefully she has nothing but good things to say about us in her report, and once that is completed we will make an appointment with the INS.

The reason we have to make a visit to our local INS office, we have to recieve permission from the INS for our child to be able to lawfully enter the United States for the purpose of being adopted. After this approval has been given and the child has been adopted and brought to the United States under a visa and/or a green card issued by the INS, then we can then apply to the INS for the child to become a United States Citizen, just as if the child had been born to the adoptive parents as their biological child. This process could take up to 60 days...just waiting! The exciting part once we get the OK...then all of the documents we have been working on will be bundled and this will complete our Dossier. The Dossier will then go to Ethiopia, and we will sit back and just wait for a child referell!

John and I have to decide before next Friday on if we are just going to ask for a girl or a boy, or just be suprised!! We are definitley asking for a baby 18 months and under.

All for now!

Lucas

Lucas is our 10 year old "little brother" . He is the one in the photo holding the red guitar! John and I became what Big Brothers and Big Sisters call a "Big Couple". We decided to donate some time each week, and looked in to seeing if we could join Big Brothers Big Sisters. Once it was decided we would be ok to apply. The next step was filling out an application online. After about a week, our case manager called us. He told us he would be our case manager and they he would make a visit to our home. He then told us about a new program called Big Couple. This allows us to be match with a child and do this as a couple!

So this past September we were matched with Lucas! Lucas lives right outside of downtown KC. We spend a few hours each week hanging out with Lucas. Dorian is his 9 year old brother.....Dorian currently does not have a Big Brother or a Big Couple to hang out with, so we had him over with Lucas on Sunday. We had great time playing video games, guitar hero and doing Karaoke!

We are especially excited about this evening. Since we have met Lucas, John has enrolled him in a weekly judo class. Lucas is getting promoted from a white belt to a yellow belt. He will be really suprised tonight! We will take some photos and post them soon!

This is Dorian playin some video games!

John and Lucas playin some Guitar Hero!

John reporting here (though Amanda is hovering nearby)...

We both took the day off of work yesterday to take care of some of the documentation we need to get our homestudy started. We both had physicals and we got our police reports from the Kansas City police department. Fortunately, both things came off without incident (looks like that embezzlement rap from '98 has been expunged from my record). In our 75 step process, we are through step 16. We are awaiting our marriage certificate from the state of Nevada and we will have everything we need to submit paperwork to the agency to start our homestudy. Next steps are to get our reference letters.

With our extra time yesterday, Amanda and I took in Juno at the local theatre. Highly recommended and exceptional performances by everyone in the cast.

Tonight, we will be taking Amanda's Grandmother Betty out to dinner at Stroud's (Famous for Fried Chicken) for her 86th birthday! I should sleep like a baby tonight after falling into a food coma.

I guess that's all for now.

75 Little Steps...

John here...
I decided to make a timeline of every conceivable step along the way to help me quantify this process. So much information was thrown our way on Friday and not in chronological order, I needed to do the guy thing and organize and evaluate each step, so I can reasonably track our process. Simple task, eh? Going through the reams of instruction that we have accumulated to date, I have identified a mere 75 steps (4 of which we have complete) that will get us home with our new baby! I then scientifically estimated the time it would take for each step. I color-coded the steps to identify steps that can be completed simultaneously (Blue and aqua), interviews (peach), things we have no control of the time (green), and arrival back home baby in tow-the ultimate goal (Gold). If I'm right, we will be coming home with little schnickelbritches on Wednesday, October 22nd (about 6:26 PM). Using our timeline, hopefully Amanda and I can identify places where we can expedite the process and hopefully finish this process a little earlier. My system is darn-near fool-proof.

We have been informed that the Ethiopian courts shut down from mid-August until the first week of October. If we are lucky we may be able to get a referral early enough that the court date can occur before this summer break. I think we may be running up against it, though. My scientific timeline gives us a referral on Thursday, July 31 (about 11:43 AM).

Anyway, Amanda and I can knock out 11 steps tonight. Away we go!

Orientation!

John and I just returned from Children's Hope Agency in Overland Park, Kansas. We had our orientation today with Jill. She is the Ethiopian Program Coordinator. We are officially starting our home study. Nikki will be our social worker..she will be making a visit to our home sometime soon to check us and our home out...not to mention everything that has happened in our past!


We have so many things to get together to complete what they call our dossier. Its basically a collection of documents that will be sent to Ethiopia. We are hoping to move through this stage pretty quickly....we have already started ordering copies of our birth certificates and marriage license.

All for now!

Starting the journey.......

Its time......we have decided to adopt!! After a lot of research about international adoption, we submitted our application to Childrens Hope International. We have asked to be considered for the Ethiopian adoption program.

So, as of December 28th, our application was mailed. Yesterday we were notified that we have our application has been accpeted and we are ready to roll!

Next step is to complete our home study and all that paperwork...........

Stay tuned!