APPROVED!!!!

I know I haven't posted much lately.  There is a two part reason for that, 1) there really wasn't much to say since we were just waiting on immigration approval and 2) I was crazy stressed and struggling with my attitude.  For a couple weeks it just felt like we were being attacked on each tiny step of this process.  All of our paperwork and approval's seem to take longer than anyone else's and every time I thought I had all the paperwork I needed I would find out that we needed yet another thing printed, notarized or certified.  To say I was very frustrated would be an understatement.  I know that really it is just a stall b/c our baby is not ready for us yet, but I really needed to move on to the next step to feel like we were making progress.   I was also feeding off of some other people's negative attitudes and letting it affect me which I usually try really hard to avoid. No worries though since I have completely realigned my outlook and attitude (trust me Mark and Konnor are VERY grateful for my new calmer self).  So now it's time to move on to the really good news.....

Our I-800a (Immigration Approval) came in the mail today!!!!  WhoooHooo!  This is the last piece of paperwork needed before we can send all our paperwork to the Chicago Chinese Consulate for authentication.  I will be doing this later this week and then the next step after that is Dossier To China (DTC)!  That means that all our paperwork will be headed to China and they will start the translation process.  It also means that our agency will start looking for the next member of the Hendricks family!   Stay tuned as we will have more frequent updates in the coming month.

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!!

Sigh.....

So not really much to report.  I called to check on the status of our home study and I could tell our poor Social Worker was reluctant to tell me.  Apparently the one she sent with ours came back almost 10 days ago and a couple she sent after ours has already come back approved.  No idea why ours is still waiting.  She sent an email to DCFS to check the status, but she hasn't heard back yet.  Maybe I will get the approval letter in the mail today?!?!  Hey, a girls gotta dream right.

We are also still waiting on the Department of State to get us back Mark's new copy of his birth certificate.  No idea why that is taking so long either since I included the postage for overnight delivery and they already cashed our check, but the good news is that they did cash our check so they did process the request.  We had sent for this in May and it took them 3 1/2 weeks to send it back to us to say they wanted different information.  So we should be getting that any day.

So we still wait.  I am surprisingly calm right now.  I know from our first adoption that all these little setbacks just mean that OUR baby is not ready for us yet.  (feel free to remind me of this particular paragraph once we are matched and in the long approval wait from China--I will need it.)

"Be still and know that I am God." Psalm 46:10

Where are we now???

So once I finally decided to stop trying to stall this adoption I attacked the paperwork with a vengeance.  During the month of April and the first week of May we had 1 in person training session, 1 home inspection, 2 interviews at the agency office, 3 physical, fingerprints and filled out stacks of paperwork (I mean STACKS!).  We had out last interview for the home study the first week of May.  It took 3 weeks for us to get a draft to review and approve and then another 3 weeks after that for our social worker and agency to rewrite and edits and approve it again.  Currently our home study is with DCFS for approval (in Illinois all adoption home studies have to be approved from the state : )  They have had it for 2 weeks and 3 days, not that I am counting or anything.  We are hoping to get our home study back this week so that we can send off our next set of paperwork which is for immigration.

About 10 days ago I was browsing an advocacy site and found a woman talking about her birth certificate not be authenticated by the Chinese Embassy in D.C.  This raised a red flag with me, b/c  if you will remember with Konnor's adoption we had a HUGE problem with Mark's birth certificate.  Well come to find out this woman does have the same birth certificate as Mark.  Long story short, Mark was a military kid born overseas and his birth certificate come from the Department of State.  Apparently there is a disagreement between the DOS and the Chinese Embassy regarding a signature on this form.  Really!?!  You would think after 3 years they could get this issue fixed.  Anywhooo, it seems that some peoples forms are not being approved, but somehow others are getting theirs to go through.  So we are currently waiting on the DOS to get us a new copy of his birth certificate and we will immediately send it for authentication.  I am trying not to stress about this, b/c I know that it will all work out exactly as God has planned, most days this works.

So that is where we are right now.  At present we are just waiting, but things are moving along.  Feel free to stop by our current fundraiser at www.justlovecoffee.com/hendricksadoption for wonderful (and I do mean it is yummy) organic fair trade coffee, hot chocolate and apparel.

Go and Go Now!

If you had asked us last Fall our plan was that by Fall 2014 we would be baby steps starting the adoption process again.  Towards the end of 2013 we started to feel the pull to start the adoption process again, but once again decided that we just were not ready.  Emotionally, Physically and most definitely Financially we were not ready, so once again it was put on the back burner.  The beginning of January our adoption agency posted that they were offering a reduced sign up fee.  We decided to sign up (I mean in an adoption you have to save money anywhere you can right?), but still did not plan on starting the process until, at the earliest, Summer.  I filled out the form and when I got to the part where it asks for references I seriously think I had my first ever anxiety attack.  At this point Konnor was really struggling with sleep and I just couldn't, I mean ABSOLUTELY COULD NOT handle another child until we got these sleep issues under control.  If I put peoples names on this paper they would call them and then what would happen.....we would be adopting again and I just was not there yet.  So......back burner again.  This was about the 2-3rd week of January.  I prayed and prayed and prayed.  I very frankly told God that if he wanted us to do this then he was just going to have to smack me in the face with it, b/c I was not ready!  Well, let's just say it is not wise to give the man upstairs ultimatums.

So here we are just a few days before the end of January.  I am at work on lunch break browsing my email/FB and BOOM!  I saw the face of the most beautiful little girl.  She just took my breath away.  I came up with all the reasons for me to not even  read why our agency was advocating for her, 1)she is older than we were considering and would only be 1 year younger than Konnor and almost 3 by the time she came home, 2) she had a neurological condition that I could't even pronounce let alone know what it is or how this would effect her long term.  3) Hello, see above, I was not ready!!!  Despite all these perfectly logical arguments I just could not get this little girl out of my head.  So here was my failsafe plan......Call Mark and explain the situation and he can be the one to tell me "No." Well guess what his response was......."see if the agency can put her file on hold and we will get it reviewed."  Ummmm, excuse me.  You were supposed to reign me in dear Husband of mine!

So we placed this little girl's file on hold and consulted Neurologists and Pediatricians to get an idea of what we would be dealing with and then we prayed.  After a week and much communication with our agency we still had many unanswered questions and decided that we were not the family for her.  We agreed to revisit her file if any new information became available, but at this time we did not feel equipped with the information we had to deal with the possible long term effects of this condition.  We decided to take God's not so subtle hint and start the adoption process again, slowly.  So the application went in and when I got the contract back I sat on it for 3 weeks before even looking at it.  I was back in "I'm not ready mode."  So once again God gave me a little nudge in the way of providing a glowing update on the little girl we had previously been considering.  Oh this made it soooo hard.  I still felt very drawn to this little girl, but after much discussion, prayer and heart searching I realized that my role was to help advocate and find her family, but that I was not meant to be her Mommy.  I cried and cried.  I felt like my heart was completely broken.  I knew she wasn't meant to be MY daughter, but I just couldn't stand that she was still waiting for a family.  Then at the beginning of April we got word that a family had in fact committed to bringing her home and making her their daughter.  I was overjoyed for her.

Even though God had made it perfectly clear to me that we were to get a move on with bringing our next little one home I managed to come up with one more stall tactic.  We didn't have the money for the home study.  Many of you know we have been working diligently on becoming a debt free home, and while we are a few years away from being completely debt free we had set certain expectations of where we would be financially before we would adopt again.  So it all came down to our taxes.  We had pre-let's start another adoption, decided exactly what we would use our tax money to pay off and that wouldn't leave us any money for a home study.  Didn't I mention above that you should not give God ultimatums?  Well I had kind of put it out there that if he could just get us through the home study I would sell, trade and fundraise my tush off to get us the rest of the way to our baby.  I just needed a starting point.  Well, our taxes came back and we would have, almost to the dollar, enough to pay off the things we had previously planned AND pay for our home study.  Okay God, I can take a not so subtle hint when I see one.  So from there I got to work.  Scheduling physicals, home study visits, filling out mounds of paperwork, fingerprints, etc.... and it's official, WE ARE ADOPTING AGAIN!  I figure this is long enough so I will fill you in on where exactly we are in the process in a few days, but I will leave you with this thought, if God is pushing you to do something stop resisting and Go.  Go and Go Now!  Because His plans are always the right plans and you can try resisting like I did, but in the end you will find so much peace in just listening and obeying.