Moving along....

So this week Mark and I both walked into the St. Louis immigration office and had our new set of fingerprints done.  Now that USCIS has our fingerprints we are just waiting on the official approval letter to come in the mail.  This is very exciting as it is the last piece of paperwork we need before all of our paperwork goes to China.  Yipppeee!!!  We are hoping to get approval in about 10-14 days.  Then we will send all of our paperwork to the Chinese Embassy in Chicago for authentication and it will be off to the agency.  At that point we will officially be DTC (Dossier To China).  Once our paperwork is in China our agency will start looking for baby Hendricks!!!!  Ahhhhhh!!!!  That means we could be seeing pictures of our little one in a month.  Wow, that really caught up with me.  Thankfully with a 3 year old already at home I haven't been able to obsess with this adoption as much as I did with the last adoption so it seems to be going faster in my mind.

On another front we also found out today that whatever issue there was with Mark's birth certificate seems to be resolved, b/c they picked his up from the Embassy today and had no difficulty at all getting it authenticated.  I just can't even begin to tell you how big of a relief it was to get that phone call.  So this weekend I will review all our paperwork once more before taking several items to get state certifications next week.  It is hard to believe we are getting to close.  Now if only I could get Mark to start talking baby names : )

Immigration, part 1

On Thursday August 7 we received confirmation that USCIS (Immigration) had received our application and would begin processing it.  It seems that this step of the process is taking anywhere from 30-50 days right now.  We are waiting on a letter from them that will tell us to go down to St. Louis and get fingerprinted.  We are hoping to walk in early for the fingerprint appointment, but it really all depends on our schedules since Konnor will be starting preschool next week.  Really nothing to do but wait for the approval at this point.  The immigration approval is the last piece of paperwork we need before we can be Dossier to China and possibly see pictures of our precious little one.  Hoping it goes quickly.

On other news I talked to a courier in D.C. and they are having difficulty getting Mark's type of birth certificate approved through the Embassy of China.  Sigh....I was hoping we wouldn't have to deal with this again.  We just received Mark's new birth certificate from the Dept. of State in the mail this weekend and I am sending it to the courier today so they can start working on getting it authenticated.  We have a back up plan in place if we can't get the form approved (basically the same as we did with Konnor's adoption), but we would prefer to just get the correct form authenticated and move on.  It will be the end of next week before we hear anything on this front.

Lastly, I am working on getting all our paperwork certified and authenticated for our dossier.  The hope is that we can get this all done in the next few weeks so that once immigration approval comes we can expedite that form and get our paperwork sent off to China for approval.  Baby steps.

Approved!!!

3 months to the day after our last home study visit and we FINALLY have an approved home study by the State of Illinois!!!  Yay!!!!  Can you feel my excitement.  I mean that wait was awful.  Apparently there was some wording that needed changed and our awesome social worker emailed and faxed everything needed (all while on vacation).  Seriously we love our Social worker, she is awesome!  So that means that tomorrow morning Konnor and I (Mark will be at Guard) will take our home study and completed I-800a immigration forms to the post office and have then sent off to USCIS.  Currently this next step is taking anywhere from 30-60 days.  In a couple weeks we will go get more fingerprints done, this time for immigration b/c you know we haven't already had 2 sets of fingerprints done and 3 background checks : )  Ok I am being a bit snarky, but really I am just so excited to be able to move on to the next step.  This week was hard for me as I was starting to get very discouraged by our lack of movement on this adoption.  I just keep reminding myself that all these little setbacks are just God's way of making sure our paperwork is ready when our baby is ready  for us (It's possible He knows I am impatient and would jump at the chance to have any of the little ones I see people advocate for as a son/daughter so he is finding ways to stall my enthusiasm a bit : )  Regardless, we are on to the next step now and will (hopefully) be seeing pictures of the next baby Hendricks in 6-8 weeks.

Yay!!!! Happy Friday everyone!!