Eventful Day

After Dan posted last night, we talked a bit about how we wanted to deal with today. I said that should we not hear from anyone at the agency by 2:00pm, then I would call them for a status report.

This morning we got up and Dan headed upstairs to do some year end paperwork for his office and our home. I was putting dishes away when the phone rang around 10:30am. Lisa (our local social worker) was on the phone asking how quickly she could come out and start our home study! I took the dates she had available (Friday or Saturday evening, or Monday), her phone number and asked Dan what worked for him. We agreed to have Lisa come out tomorrow (Friday) evening to start our home study! For the rest of the morning/afternoon Dan and I have been working furiously around the house to straighten up, put things away, and generally get the house in order. Dan has spent much of the day in his office, and I've worked steadily on getting the dining room, living room, kitchen, and our bed/bathroom tidy. My mom is coming over tomorrow afternoon to help with a final spruce (hopefully including a vacuum and mop since those two tasks are two things that still bother my back).

The other exciting event for today is that we turned in our I-600A paperwork, which is our petition to adopt an orphan. I chose to drive the documentation and the money order down to the Department of Homeland Security myself, and in doing so, we were able to get about three weeks ahead of anyone who chose to mail their paperwork into the office! From what I have been reading, many people send their I-600A in, and sometimes it's a month or more until they get an invitation for FBI fingerprinting. But not for us! We go for our FBI fingerprinting (and background check) on Tuesday, January 2, at 9:00am. Once that is done, the government will begin processing us in the system, but they will have to wait for final approval from our social worker in order to issue us the I-171H (which is our document that we give to Vietnam, and the document that will tell us how many children we are allowed to adopt). The woman I worked with at the DHS office was wonderful. She said she is running about three weeks out on paperwork, but depending on our circumstances (for instance if the agency had a referral for us very quickly) she might be able to expedite our paperwork if necessary. I don't think this will be necessary, but one can hope, can't she?

So, in 24 hours we'll be meeting with Lisa in our home. She said she will be here about three hours, and once we've met with her we might actually know a little bit more about the process, timelines, etc. One of us will update after our meeting.