I600a was Approved !

We received a letter from the Department of Homeland Security that our I600a was approved on 11/26/2008. This is the application for advanced processing to bring an orphan into the US. We had a quick turn around on this application it only took 13 days. Some states it takes up to 3 months to be processed. We hope everything else goes this smoothly.

Fingerprinted !

We went to Fort Smith Thursday, November 13 and filed our I600a and got fingerprinted.

Homestudy Approved !!!!!!!!!

We are now on the waiting list for a baby girl. We are so excited to have one step completed. Benjamin can't wait til we go get his baby sister.

Homestudy Pre-Approved

Our Social worker has our homestudy written. She emailed us a copy to review. She will now email a copy to Eugene, OR for pre-approval. After that she will fed-ex the complete packet to Eugene, OR.
Well she already has a response back and we are pre-approved!!!
Now we can make an appointment with the USCIS office in Fort Smith to have our fingerprints taken.

Homestudy

Our Social worker came for our home visit. It went very well. She said everything looked great. She took a short tour of our house and then interviewed us one on one. We each talked about our lives from childhood til now. It will take her a few weeks to get it written up and then she will forward it on to Eugene, OR where the Holt International headquarters is located.

First Homestudy Meeting

We had our first meeting with our Social Worker on Saturday Night Sep. 20, 2008. She has 6 new families that are just starting the process. We had a group meeting and got to know the families. 3 are adopting from Korea, 1 with Ethiopia, and 1 with China. We had a great meeting. We are now just waiting to schedule a time for our Social Worker to come to our house for the actual home visit. We have to have 2 face to face visits with her before our homestudy can be sent to Korea. So we are very anxious for her to do our home visit. She said it's very unusual that she has 6 new families at the same time. She usually has 6-8 per year. So needless to say it may take longer to get our home visit. So for now we are just hanging in there.

Getting Ready for Home Study

Well we received our packet to get ready for our home study on Friday August 22,2008.
Daniel and I both have to fill out a personal data form that is 16 pages long. We also have to read two books. Toddler Adoption by Best, and Raising Adopted Children by Melina. So needless to say we have a lot to do. The adoption process should take 21-24 months.

Kindergarten

Benjamin started Kindergarten today. He did great when we dropped him off. It wasn't as hard for me as I had imagined because he was so excited to be there. When I picked him up he said he had a great day and only got in trouble 1 time and his fish got moved down 1 level.

Starting the Process

Well we have started the process to adopt a baby girl from Korea. We sent in our application on August 1oth. We are using Holt International Adoption Agency. We are now waiting on the paper work to start our home study.
Today August 19th we attended a Web Seminar provided by Holt. It was very informative and answered some of the questions we had.
We are very excited and can't wait to see what's next.