Home Study Week.

For the first time today, I admit I finally had that feeling that wait a minute.. this adoption might actually happen. This is real, and not just some dream Lindsey and I have thought up. Since our last post on the adoption, we have received all of the required paperwork needed for our Home Study, completed the CPR classes, and passed (after failing once) the fire inspection.

With all of that done we were finally able to schedule our Home Study with Adoption Circle. This is the last step needed to complete our I-600A that we submitted to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services back in October. The Home Study is really in three parts. First being all of the paperwork and background checks we completed. Second being, today, when we visited this morning the offices of Adoption Circle for an interview with our social worker. During this time she got caught up on where we were in the process, and where we answered several misc. questions regarding why we were adopting, etc. It wasn’t a bad visit at all, and fairly laid back. For some reason I think we felt like we would be entering into some sort of interrogation, but it couldn’t have been further from it. If anyone reading is about to start a home study, whether for domestic or international adoption, take a breath. As long as you have all of your ducks in a row you’ll be fine.

Part three of the home study actually continues tomorrow. Our social worker will be making the trip out to our apartment for further individual interviews, as well as a safety audit. We’re a little nervous about this, but for the most part our house is still in pretty good order since our fire inspection. Really, I think the purpose of this visit if anything is to make sure we don’t live in a dysfunctional home with 100 cats or something. I’m sure we’ll be fine.

From these two visits today and tomorrow, the home study report will be written, checked over, sent over to our case worker at CWA, checked again, finalized, notarized, and apostilled. We weren’t sure how long it would take them to actually write the home study, but we were told today that it would take about two weeks. Honestly, it’s almost a surprise to us. If we have our home study copies ready by the end of this month we’ll be ready to finalize our U.S. paperwork and wait for approval from the USCIS. It could take up to three months from the time we send in our paperwork to get final approval from our government, but from the sound of it, we’re told we shouldn’t have to wait that long. (Knock on wood… we’re ready for delays if they come up).

Here’s another exciting bit we’ve learned. Obviously once we get U.S. approval we start working on our dossier paperwork for the Ukraine government. In the past we had learned that once we complete all of the dossier the next step would be to send it over to the Ukraine and wait about 2 to 3 months for Ukraine to approve us and send us a travel date. Well, now we have learned that Ukraine has just started a pre-registration process where first all we need to do is send a copy of our home study report and a Power of Attorney. After that is sent in, there has been reported cases that after just 10 days or so (not 2 to 3 months), Ukraine will give you a travel date with a month notice. With the pre-registration process in place they let you bring the remaining paperwork with you on your trip. This quite frankly is amazing. Now, I know God might put delays in our path regardless, but with this latest development of how fast things are moving we could be seeing this adoption being finalized a lot sooner than we had expected. For the longest time we had things planned out for June or July, but June might now be the very latest with April/May looking more like a reality.

We’re trying to not get too excited, because we know delays are inevitable in international adoption, but it’s exciting to hear how things are speeding up. It’s a little scary too though, as we have a lot we need to complete to get prepared to bring a child into this home, and we still have a lot of money we need to save. But whatever happens, I’m sure God will get us through it, even if we still end up making our trip in the middle of summer.

So things are shaping up well. It’s also exciting to hear on the news tonight how several orphans from Haiti were able to get their adoption expedited and are now with loving American families. I really am happy to see how international adoption is becoming a national subject.

To wrap up, please continue to keep us in your prayers as we still have several decisions to make while we get ready for this change in our lives. As well, for those who know them, keep the Yoder’s and the Goodman’s in your prayers as they get closer and closer to their respective adoptions.

Now, I better start helping the wife clean this place for tomorrow. 😉