Saturday, January 30, 2010

Making Progress

The social worker that we used for our home study when we adopted Samuel will be doing our home study for our new adoption as well.  I really like him and he thinks this home study will be pretty easy for him since he'll just need to update our old one and add a few additional things needed for an international adoption.  That does not give us much time to clean up the house but I know we can do it and the SW is pretty laid back so it does not need to be perfect.  I'll probably take a day off of work in the next week or so to get the house picked up since our weeks and weekends have been so busy lately. 

I also have my physical scheduled so we are moving along.  I think I have all of the official documents (birth certificates, marriage certificate, etc.) that are needed so hopefully once the homestudy is complete we can file our i-600a and officially start the waiting process.  We'll continue to work on our dossier during that period too but the dossier requirements are not too bad.

There are 9 families in Rwanda now picking up their 12 kids and most of them have blogs that I have been folloiwng.  It is making me very anxious to be there too.  Soon.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Big News!

Although a lot of our family and friends know this already, I am officially announcing to the world that we are starting the process to adopt again.  We are going to go the international route (from Rwanda) this time and I am very anxious to get the process started.

From all of the research I have done, we should have a new son join our family in 12 - 18 months.  I have already called the social worker that did the home study for our domestic adoption and he is willing and able to do our home study for this adoption too.  I am hoping that we'll be able to get the home study done relatively quickly since he already knows us and can use our prior home study as a starting point for a lot of the boiler plate stuff.  Unfortunately the first part of the process (after the home study) is getting approval from the INS and the Dallas field office has one of the longest processing times in the country.  The national average to process a I-600A is 3.5 months and the Dallas office averages 7.7 months.  We are just starting the process and I am already annoyed by the potential delays but just pray and hope that our son is/will be well taken care of until we can get to Rwanda.

I'll be using this blog to track our progress in this journey.

I will be happy to answer any questions if you leave them in the comments.