Homestudy is Complete!

I'm not doing very well keeping this updated on a regular basis. Trying to think what all has happened in this last month. We FINALLY got our official homestudy in the mail on Friday! Yay!!! Not very happy with the timeline on that but there's nothing we can do about that. I immediately had Jeremy go to FedEx on Friday afternoon to ship off our I600a to USCIS. That can take about 5 weeks – 3 months to get back. This give us clearance from the US to adopt a child internationally. This will take the longest of the items that are required for our dossier. I'm really hoping to complete our dossier at the beginning of January. If not we will have to re-request copies of our birth certificates & marriage license as all documents have to be dated within 6 months of being submitted to Ethiopia. The dossier is the last step before we get placed on the wait list. It's funny to think about being excited to “WAIT” but if you ask any adoptive parent they will understand! Of course that will be extremely hard to WAIT but I know God will work in his timing. We have no idea what the wait time will be for us. Hoping not too long but we also need LOTS more funding before we receive our referral as we will owe $8500 before we can accept the referral & also another $5500 if we get 2 siblings. I am going to start applying to grants over the next few months & hopefully we will receive enough. Many of the grants take several months to find out if we are accepted & how much we will receive. The grant applications require a bunch of paperwork as well. This is all SO much work but it will be so worth it to finally get to have our child(ren) home! We just got our first order of sheets in from our fundraiser & raised $522 from that one order. These sheets are amazing!!! So soft & a great deal. Make sure you contact me if you want to place an order!

As always, thank you all for your prayers & support! Keep the prayers coming! Please feel free to share our journey with others that may be interested!