Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
We have good news! The day (or two) after writing the last update, our psychologist contacted Kyle and the corrections that needed to be made were completed by the end of the week! I'm pretty sure he got in touch with us so quickly because our physician (who originally recommended this psychologist) put in a phone call on our behalf to speed along his response. Thank heavens!
We also just received Kyle's birth certificate in the mail from California!
What this all means is..... We are sending our paperwork into the agency on Monday! We are still waiting on our immigration pre-approval form to arrive in the mail (we pray that any day now that will come) and we have another form that needs re-apostilled because Honduras decided to change the formatting of the form, BUT that's it! I can't believe how close we are.
Continue to pray that things progress smoothly over the next week or two and that our final pieces come together quickly. Our family coordinator will review all the documents now so that as soon as the immigration approval arrives and is apostilled and we get that sent in with the new form....then it can be off to Honduras!!
Once it is in Honduras, the waiting begins. We have to wait for it to be translated and approved. After that is when we will receive our waitlist number. That could take as little as 4 months and, honestly, as long as 8 months? We just pray that these last steps occur quickly and that the Lord moves our paperwork through expeditiously so we can receive that long-anticipated waitlist number.
We trust that in each of these steps the Lord is teaching us lessons. We are learning about patience, surrender and how to love a child we've never even met. We know we still have a long road ahead of us, but it all excites us so much!
Thank you for your prayers and we'll let you know when the paperwork is on it's way to Honduras!
Saturday, December 29, 2012
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
The Ups and Downs...So Close, Yet Still So Far Away
I've certainly not been the most faithful updater, and for that I apologize. Between work, and now the holidays, and just other life things...it's been hard to keep y'all up-to-date on our process.
The Good News -- We are so close to being finished with our paperwork! I was hoping that everything would be off to our agency by this point so that with the first of the year it would be sent off to Honduras for translation and review. Unfortunately we're lagging behind just a bit.
Last Monday, however, we got to go to Pittsburgh and have our immigration pre-approval fingerprints done three weeks early! We took a chance that we could walk in and have them done. Thank heavens they weren't busy that day and we were done within 15 minutes. That will hopefully save us some time. Now we're just anxiously waiting for the I-600a to arrive in the mail. This form is the most important form we will have for the adoption. It is our approval to bring our child home from Honduras when that day comes. When we get it, we'll make a copy of it to go with our paperwork to Honduras, but the original stays in our possession. We're praying for quick processing of this form and that we have it soon!
At the end of November we were blessed to finally get our psych report in our hands!!! We were thankful to have found a psychologist who was willing to do the extensive evaluation we required for the adoption, but he was nearly impossible to communicate with about getting the report once we had our face-to-face meeting. Thank heavens that our family coordinator from the agency was able to put some pressure on and three months after we had our meeting, we finally had the document.
All of our paperwork has been certified and apostilled and we've found this process to be relatively easy, just expensive. We're just waiting on California to get us Kyle's birth certificate back, but Ohio and Pennsylvania were speedy quick with the processing of the documents we sent to them.
Other happy news is that even though there have still been hiccups in Honduras, it seems as though things are still moving through and families are still getting new waiting numbers (moving up in the list) and others are starting to receive referrals. There had been a long pause for a time while there was a government worker strike, but hopefully things have smoothed out for the new year and the process continues to flow. The country is also working harder to get more orphans "paper ready" or officially abandoned and available to adopt. With more children ready to be adopted, more families that can be matched with them to bring them home!
The Downs -- Our most recent "down" is that yesterday I sat down to read our psych eval out of curiosity. Now I know that I should have read it the day he gave it to us, but honestly, I didn't really want to read all of the psych babble about us. Our agency had already read it through before it was approved and we had to go through an additional interview with our social worker to clarify some things that the psychologist had written in our evaluation, so I honestly felt like I had a good idea of the things he said in it. Well, I didn't anticipate that he'd have numerous typos and grammatical errors or that he'd actually have details incorrect -- my parents' last name, and Kyle's mom's name spelled wrong for instance. It seems nit-picky, but the psych evaluation is the one thing that consistently seems difficult to get Honduras to approve - even ones that are perfect seem to be rejected for who-only-knows-why. I was devastated when I read it. I marked all the errors, but now we have to go through the hassle of trying to get him to return phone calls and emails (which was the problem in the first place when we were originally trying to get the report from him) and get him to fix these errors ASAP. I could potentially overlook the typos and grammatical errors - except that this document has to be translated and so it will be difficult for that person to properly translate if it is not written correctly....and the actually fact errors are not passable. Everything in every document has to match or it has the potential to be rejected. Then we have to get the document re-certified and re-apostilled because of the changes that have to made to it. All of this equals more time and money when we thought we were basically just waiting on our I-600a document. Just when I think I'm on top of every detail possible, stuff like this slips past me and it is so frustrating.
Prayers that you can join us in:
1. Kyle's birth certificate arrives in the mail with its apostille ASAP.
2. Our psychologist communicates with us in a timely fashion so that we can get him to make the necessary corrections and changes.
3. Once we have our new psych eval - the certification and apostille process happen very quickly so they can get to our agency with the rest of our paperwork.
4. Our I-600a arrives soon!
We hope that you have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Thank you again for coming along this journey with us! I promise I will update you on how the above prayer requests are answered...
The Good News -- We are so close to being finished with our paperwork! I was hoping that everything would be off to our agency by this point so that with the first of the year it would be sent off to Honduras for translation and review. Unfortunately we're lagging behind just a bit.
Last Monday, however, we got to go to Pittsburgh and have our immigration pre-approval fingerprints done three weeks early! We took a chance that we could walk in and have them done. Thank heavens they weren't busy that day and we were done within 15 minutes. That will hopefully save us some time. Now we're just anxiously waiting for the I-600a to arrive in the mail. This form is the most important form we will have for the adoption. It is our approval to bring our child home from Honduras when that day comes. When we get it, we'll make a copy of it to go with our paperwork to Honduras, but the original stays in our possession. We're praying for quick processing of this form and that we have it soon!
At the end of November we were blessed to finally get our psych report in our hands!!! We were thankful to have found a psychologist who was willing to do the extensive evaluation we required for the adoption, but he was nearly impossible to communicate with about getting the report once we had our face-to-face meeting. Thank heavens that our family coordinator from the agency was able to put some pressure on and three months after we had our meeting, we finally had the document.
All of our paperwork has been certified and apostilled and we've found this process to be relatively easy, just expensive. We're just waiting on California to get us Kyle's birth certificate back, but Ohio and Pennsylvania were speedy quick with the processing of the documents we sent to them.
Other happy news is that even though there have still been hiccups in Honduras, it seems as though things are still moving through and families are still getting new waiting numbers (moving up in the list) and others are starting to receive referrals. There had been a long pause for a time while there was a government worker strike, but hopefully things have smoothed out for the new year and the process continues to flow. The country is also working harder to get more orphans "paper ready" or officially abandoned and available to adopt. With more children ready to be adopted, more families that can be matched with them to bring them home!
The Downs -- Our most recent "down" is that yesterday I sat down to read our psych eval out of curiosity. Now I know that I should have read it the day he gave it to us, but honestly, I didn't really want to read all of the psych babble about us. Our agency had already read it through before it was approved and we had to go through an additional interview with our social worker to clarify some things that the psychologist had written in our evaluation, so I honestly felt like I had a good idea of the things he said in it. Well, I didn't anticipate that he'd have numerous typos and grammatical errors or that he'd actually have details incorrect -- my parents' last name, and Kyle's mom's name spelled wrong for instance. It seems nit-picky, but the psych evaluation is the one thing that consistently seems difficult to get Honduras to approve - even ones that are perfect seem to be rejected for who-only-knows-why. I was devastated when I read it. I marked all the errors, but now we have to go through the hassle of trying to get him to return phone calls and emails (which was the problem in the first place when we were originally trying to get the report from him) and get him to fix these errors ASAP. I could potentially overlook the typos and grammatical errors - except that this document has to be translated and so it will be difficult for that person to properly translate if it is not written correctly....and the actually fact errors are not passable. Everything in every document has to match or it has the potential to be rejected. Then we have to get the document re-certified and re-apostilled because of the changes that have to made to it. All of this equals more time and money when we thought we were basically just waiting on our I-600a document. Just when I think I'm on top of every detail possible, stuff like this slips past me and it is so frustrating.
Prayers that you can join us in:
1. Kyle's birth certificate arrives in the mail with its apostille ASAP.
2. Our psychologist communicates with us in a timely fashion so that we can get him to make the necessary corrections and changes.
3. Once we have our new psych eval - the certification and apostille process happen very quickly so they can get to our agency with the rest of our paperwork.
4. Our I-600a arrives soon!
We hope that you have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Thank you again for coming along this journey with us! I promise I will update you on how the above prayer requests are answered...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)