We are so happy to announce that we finished our final homestudy interview yesterday!! Brad and I had our last session at our house while the girls were at a friends playing. We were able to hand over all of our education certificates, documents we had been collecting and medicals to our social worker. We discussed our parenting techniques and philosophies and really talked a lot about how we could prepare our biological children for our new family member. It was a very helpful session...but I am happy we can move past the home study and on to new things!
I got most of our t-shirt orders mailed out last week and I am so thrilled to be receiving peoples pictures of their family members wearing the shirts!! It makes my heart so happy to know that people are supporting us through their thoughts and prayers all over the country. I plan to create a page with all our sweet supporters pictures on it so we can remember all the ones who have traveled along this journey with us.
So now what?
1) Our social worker will type up our total homestudy into a formal document which will be proofed and read and approved by our agency. Once it is finalized (we are hoping end of January or first week of February) then they will send our documents to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). We will then wait for their approval. We also will submit our I-800a application to them. This is basically the United States giving our family approval to bring home our adopted child from another country. This COULD take 2-3 months. Pray that things move quickly and we are approved with no hang ups.
2) We will be able to send our approved homestudy to Adopt Together (https://www.adopttogether.org/) and begin setting up our crowd funding family adoption page. Several people have asked about using our adoption as a charitable donation option- and we will soon have that ability! We are also in the process of collecting items from friends and family to host a large yard sale this spring- in which we will raise awareness for orphans and raise money to help our family through this expensive process.
3) I will go one step further after our USCIS approval. After our approval we will have all of our dossier documents authenticated and authorized to be sent over to China! When that happens we will be DTC!! Major milestone. We are getting close.
