AGENCY NEWS!

We've had a few conference calls with our new agency in past few weeks so I thought I'd fill you in on what's going on at this point. 

The good news is that they have finally received some referrals (that's adoption speak for the info on the child that will become yours), 2 to be exact and there hadn't been any referrals in several months!! They believe that things are going to be moving along quickly from here on out, so we're excited about that. I also found out that there are about 30-40 families in our program and we're some where around 10-15th on  the "list that doesn't exist". The thing we have going for us is that we have said that we're open to either gender, so that should/could speed things along for us.

The not so good news is that several things have changed since we went through this with Brady. The biggest (in my opinion) is the fact that we now have to be "paper ready" before a referral will be presented to us. At this point we are not paper ready, so we've got some work to do.  We only have one thing left to do to complete our homestudy, so that's good. Once I go to the doctor on Friday we'll send our paperwork to our social worker who will write up the homestudy, then we'll have to have it approved by our Agency before it can be finalized. Once it's finalized we can then apply for Immigration approval to be able to bring an orphan into the United States. Once we get that approval, we then get an appointment to be fingerprinted at the federal level, then we'll be paper ready!!! I'm guessing that we should be able to get this done by sometime in January or February. While I understand this new change I'm a little annoyed by it because we literally did nothing for a good 3 months because I didn't want to rush out and get everything done just to have them expire before we completed the process because then we would have needed to get all of these things renewed, which, of course, costs extra!!! But, what's done is done and I can't change their minds, so we just have to go with the flow and get moving!! I am hoping that since we've been fingerprinted once already on the federal level that perhaps it won't take as long to get an appointment this time, but that could be wishful thinking on my part.

As always, stay tuned and I'll keep you all posted with new details as they come in!!