The latest...

We had heard from Judy late last week about the two orphanages that CCAI is working with currently. The orphanage names are "Lifeline" and "Maison" Maison is quite a bit more expensive than Lifeline.  Judy said she didn't want to start sending us files and have us fall in love with a child and realize we can't afford it.  We told her we were open to both orphanages. She replied back today and said we should start receiving files by the end of this week or early next week. This is all quite surreal right now. It's hard to imagine that we may soon be looking at a photo of our child(ren) very soon. We are completely relying on the Holy Spirit's leading at this point. It's all we can do.

Stephen took a half day today to get some adoption things done. He's been blessed with tremendous health so he's got oodles and oodles of family sick leave that his boss has allowed him to use for adoption reasons.  His taking time off was definitely the leading of the Holy Spirit as we heard from CCAI about our Dossier today and there were a few corrections that needed to be made. One correction was a line in our home study that they wanted fixed. Stephen got in touch with our home study agency right away and they sent him a new copy immediately. Then, Stephen's birth certificate (a tiny, cute little thing in the words of Kim, our Dossier specialist) needed to be a full sheet of paper. For some reason Stephen's birth certificate was this tiny little card and even though it's legit, CCAI felt Haiti wouldn't think it was legit. So he drove up to West Union to get a new copy. The Fayette County Recorder's office was super helpful and had it all ready to go when he arrived. The last thing that needed to be fixed for the Dossier was we both forgot to sign our passports ...ooops and duh!! So we signed those tonight.

Stephen also completed the I-600A form. This form is an application for advance processing of orphan petition. It's for immigration. It gets sent to Texas with a big check and then Texas sends it to some place in Missouri. We're not sure how long that process will take, but the immigration office will contact us when it's complete and they will tell us where and when to get fingerprinted (again). There is a lot of redundancy in government. Even though we've been fingerprinted for the FBI, it's not good enough for immigration.

We just keep jumping through the hoops! ...