Progress

Today was a day of movement.  I was contacted and told that the corrected signature pages for our home study were received and that they had 3 notarized copies of our home study ready for me to pick up!

I drove up to WIAA and picked up our home study packets.  I also made copies of our birth certificates and marriage certificate and put them together with our I-800a application & supplement 2 application (which I had to stop and have Mark sign), a cashier's check for our application and new sets of fingerprints, and one of our copies of our home study...and headed to FedEx to mail that envelope off!

I also filled out our application for having documents authenticated and had a pre-paid envelope made up (addressed to be mailed to us from the State Capitol).  I will hand deliver all those documents and the return envelope to the capitol myself tomorrow!

Feels good to make some concrete progress today.  Yay!

Yes, it's a virtue.

I've struggled my whole life with the elusive virtue of patience.  I'm not the most decisive person in the world (those who know me would chuckle at that understatement).  BUT once I know what I want to do I go after things with gusto.  This adoption has been no different.  After things fell through with Ethiopia I was distraught, overwhelmed, conflicted, and nervous about our next move.  Once we knew Haiti was right though we hit the ground running.  So, it's hard to have little hang ups holding us back from finishing our paper chase.  (And yes I do realize those hang ups will continue, and in more dramatic fashion, later in our adoption)

Our home study has been finished for just over a week and I thought we would been able to have it in hand within days to be able mail off our USCIS application and to get our dossier authenticated.  However, we had a little hang up.  Our case worker quit working for WIAA.  Gratefully he did agree to finish writing our home study, but once it was finished and updated he emailed a copy of it to WIAA and mailed a hard copy of the last pages with his signature on it.  Apparently, when WIAA received the pages they were printed out of line with the previous pages so they had to have him resign and mail new pages.  They still haven't received them yet.  So!  We are still waiting on those.  I am particularly anxious to get the USCIS application off since it takes so long to process and we have to attend a fingerprinting appointment that they will designate before we get a favorable determination letter back from them allowing us to move forward.

Gah!  I'm just so impatient.

I called WIAA today and they said that the new signature pages haven't come still so hopefully Monday.  So, hopefully next week we can get the ball rolling on the USCIS application and authenticating the dossier...

Homestudy is done!!!!!

I just got an email from our case worker Josh that he has made all the final adjustments to our home study and it is done!  Wahooo!  He'll drop it in the mail to WIAA now and they'll notarize it as soon as they get it!  Then I can mail off our USCIS application and get our dossier documents authenticated!

Yay!

Check and check.

Psychological letters picked up!

All dossier documents (except the one letter of recommendation) all scanned in and emailed to WIAA for approval!

Tired and happy. Kind of like fat and happy, but not.

We were unsuccessful picking up our psych evaluations tonight, but have made arrangements to do it tomorrow, BUT...as I was heading to bed tonight I saw that our case worker Josh sent me a copy of our updated home study late tonight for me to review and make changes to.  I spent the last 90 minutes very thoroughly going through it and found 15 things that needed to be changed/updated.  So, I typed all of those up and sent them off to him!  Hopefully he's able to offer pretty quick turnaround time on that so we can get that puppy notarized and mail of our USCIS application!

Woot woot!

Coming along

Our psych evaluations are prepared and notarized!  We just need to pick them up.

Also, my friend is able to get their letter of recommendation notarized today and hopefully send off to state authentication.

Lastly, today I sent a $400 check to WIAA ahead of us scanning them all our dossier documents.  That way when we scan them the documents they'll already have the check to move forward with translating it! Chareyl told me that we can go ahead and scan everything except the letter of recommendation and we can get the translation process started while we wait for that.

Slowly, but surely!

Anxious to wait

The content in my updates isn't very meaty, but I'm just so anxious and need to be able to "talk" about this somewhere.  We obviously still have a very long journey ahead of us, I'm just anxious to get these last few steps done so we can start really waiting.  Yup.  It's the hurry up and wait stage for sure.

On Friday we did get a copy of our insurance letter confirming coverage details.  I was able to pass that on to our case worker, so he now has everything he needs to finish writing up our home study update!  Also, I failed to mention that our government approved funding for homeland security, so once we have a finalized copy of our home study and are able to submit our application, there won't be a big wait for our paperwork as more pressing matters are caught up on from a closure.  So that's good.

So, while we wait on our home study to submit USCIS paperwork the only documents we're still waiting on to finish our dossier are the psychological evaluation and one last letter of recommendation.  As soon as those are in we will get our whole dossier packet authenticated and translated!  Woot woot!

One last thing I remembered today when I was thinking about my number nerdy-ness about the 12th (like I mentioned in my last post).  The day the disastrous earthquake hit Haiti was January 12, 2010. Haiti was already the poorest country in the Western hemisphere before the earthquake, and the death and destruction that earthquake caused really put Haiti in ruins.  Literally.  When I hear people talk about Haiti it is used as a modern time marker (before the earthquake or after the earthquake).  Any country or city would still be struggling 5 years after a disaster of that magnitude, but a country that was already so destitute has far less means and infrastructure to heal itself.

Anyway!  I remember thinking it was interesting that our home study visit was on the 5 year anniversary of the earthquake, but don't know whether or not I wrote anything down here about it or not.  It's just yet another notable event that happened on the 12th.

Praying for that home study update to come through today or tomorrow...