Done!...and more to do...

I sent our I-600A form in to Immigration last week, and express-mailed our dossier to AAI yesterday - yay!

We are waiting to receive the DVD of waiting children right now. My friend Deanna, who adopted 3 children from Ethiopia through AAI, put me in contact with another mom who has adopted from there. She has been there more recently and met many of the children, so that will be really helpful as we are trying to decide whom we are to adopt.

The next thing on my to-do list is to apply for some adoption loans. There are Christian organizations that offer no-interest loans to families for adoption; this would be a huge blessing for us. So far, the money we have had to pay has been pretty spread out, and not in huge amounts (the largest being $2400); but when we choose the children we are going to adopt, we will need to pay $4000. Then, when the case is submitted to court, we will need $5000 more. The final big chunks needed will be for traveling to Ethiopia, which we have to do twice, once for court and once to bring the children home. I'm not really sure how much we will need for those trips, but I'm estimating $3000 for the first trip and $6000 for the second.

The great thing is that there is a refundable adoption tax credit now, $13,170 per child in 2010, so if we can get loans for these costs, we can repay them easily with the tax credits. Anyway, please pray that we will be approved for some loans, enough to cover our major costs.

Working on the dossier...

So, our home study was finished a few weeks ago, but then we were waiting for the rest of the money we needed for the agency fee ($2400) so they could send us info on how to put together our dossier. We finally got the rest of it a couple of weeks ago and paid, and they sent us the instructions. 

Unfortunately, I was sick when they came (sinus infection that lasted forever!), so I just started working on the dossier this past week. But the good thing is that even though it's a long list of documents, most aren't taking that long to get together. I got the majority of it done this week, and right now I'm just waiting on a few things to come back to us (like a couple of reference letters, a letter from our accountant, and letters from our doctors). We also have to have everything notarized, which we'll do tomorrow. Once I have everything, I will send it to our agency, hopefully this week; and they will send it on to Ethiopia. 

The other thing we have to do is send in our I-600A form, "Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition," to the U.S. Immigration Department. It's basically to let them know that you are going to be adopting; once you have identified the children, you file another form called "Petition to Classify Orphan as an Immediate Relative." After the I-600A is filed, we will be contacted by immigration and will need to go get fingerprinted (any adults living in the home have to do this, so it will be me, Darren and Justin).

With this I-600A form, we have to send in a copy of our home study, which we are waiting for right now. I got an email from the adoption agency saying that whereas in the past, only a synopsis of the home study was translated into Amharic (the language of Ethiopia), now every word has to be translated; so she pointed out a few things that needed to be re-worded in it. For instance, in one place our social worker said, "They have a blast when they're together," and she said a translator might not know what that means. :)  Our social worker is working on the changes now, and hopefully will get a copy of the home study to us this week.

So, that's where we are in the process. I hope that we can finish up the dossier this week and get it all in, and then we can actually start looking at the available children and see who God leads us to!