Monday, September 1, 2014

PAPERWORK - Dossier

Update on our paperwork situation.  I mentioned in my last post that we were told to wait until our move was done to start the dossier.  Everything is time sensitive regarding the dossier.  You can't do it and then wait to send it.  You have to do it all in one small time-frame.  It all basically hinged on the processing of our I-600A (our application to be approved as adopters of orphans).  We were told this takes a couple months, but the approval letter (I-171H) showed up at our door only a few weeks after our biometrics appointment up in Cleveland.  That changed the game a bit.  Now that we would have to process the address change with the federal government anyway, our social worker said, let's get to dossier-ing!  (That's not what she said, I made that word up.)  But that's how it felt!  Zack and I breathed a big fat sigh of relief and said "LET'S DO THIS!!!"  There was high fiving and grinning, and, well, you had to be there.  It was small scale torture to wait for my parent's house to be done and to get this move on.  Plus I felt like it was pressuring my parents which isn't fair.  So this really changed the game for my parents, too.  They can be a little more relaxed with the building.
The biggest change is that we will have to prepare this tiny, less-than-ideal home for potentially 2 more children!  Zack is up to the challenge and is at his best doing things like this.  We shifted stuff around and hauled some stuff off to storage.  We have been approved to house this many children in this house, so we'll make it work to the best of our ability, with loads of God's help!  Thanks everyone for praying and asking how we are doing even though we have such boring things to share!  Someday we will be posting milestones of our new child, and we will remember this paperwork stage as "the wilderness", but important nonetheless.