Hope this update finds the new year starting as happy as it has for us!
Our first and newest update is that we're pregnant!
Holy cow! I know! We were certainly surprised when I found out I was pregnant right before Thanksgiving. I am 14 weeks along now and will be due at the end of July. With our agency we just had to submit a "Concurrent Family Building" application and our social worker needed to write a letter recommending that we were able to both adopt and have a child by birth at the same time. That was all just approved by our agency and so we're able to continue with our plans as originally laid out.
We feel so blessed that we have two children to expect now - they're just on different timelines :-) We see different challenges but also many blessing in the way our family is growing. Kyle and I were prepared to wait 2-5 years to bring home our first child -- God says our first child will now be home in 6 months! Now we'll be "broken in" and "experienced" (haha, are parents ever?) parents for when our adoptive child comes home. We are also thrilled that our children are guaranteed to have each other! We knew we wanted to have more than one child, but now it's a sure thing.
Second update is that we got our immigration pre-approval in the mail today!!
Cool story: Last week I called USCIS to see where our application stood that we sent in to them mid-November. We had our fingerprints done on December 10 and so I was beginning to worry that it was a month and we still hadn't been approved. I called the office and spoke to a very nice and helpful agent. She looked us up in the system and told me that we hadn't even been assigned a case worker yet -- this was pretty disappointing. She did say that she was currently working on her cases that had come in around the same time so she anticipated we'd be getting a case worker within a few days. I asked her to at least check that our fingerprints and such were all in the system -- she confirmed this, so that was at least good news. fast forward to the end of the day.....I had a message on my phone from the same agent I had spoken to earlier in the day. She said that when we hung up, the next application on her desk was ours! She worked through processing it, said it all looked good to her and it was just pending approval of her supervisor! She said she anticipated that it would all be approved within a day and we'd have the paperwork within the week. How amazing is that? God is so good!! What are the chances that our application was the next one she would get to and what are the chances that she would take the time to call me to tell me this?!
Even better news is that now we have our last official form. Now we have to get a copy notarized, certified, and apostilled -- the last missing piece so that we can finally get our paperwork to Honduras! Once we get that to our agency, the paperwork will go and we'll have a several month wait to be on the waitlist. During that time Honduras may tell us they need certain forms redone or resubmitted or that they need additional documentation. We're praying that none of that is required, but as we've seen thus far -- it's all in God hands and we trust that He is in control of it all.
Thank you all so much for your prayers! I hope that through these updates you can see what a wonderful God it is that we serve and how He can take care of even the smallest details in our lives.
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