Approved!

Just a brief update – D and I received our I800-A receipt of approval in the mail yesterday! We are good to go for an adoption for one child between the ages of 0-2 through November of next year~ yay!

What we got in the mail was the not the official form we need to sign and have apostilled. I have since learned that yes, that was the official form. We needed an affidavit, once again, outlining that we agreed the attached copies were true copies of the form from Custom & Immigration. So it was off to the notary’s office… again.

I have contacted our international adoption agency for further guidance, but at this point we are only waiting on THREE things for our dossier:

• Signed and Apostilled USCIS Approval Form Copy Affidavits
• Apostilled HR letters for D
• One last Apostilled Reference Letter from a Friend

Then it’s off to South Africa to wait!

Paperwork Blur.

In the past few months, D has been out of the country a lot. So much so that I had to start a new job, and interview for a different job, with him overseas. It meant that a lot of our paperwork has been put on hold for the past month (hence no update since I was all frazzled and lonely). But now that he has been back and settled for a week without dashing off somewhere, we were able to submit our approval application to Custom and Immigration Services for permission to adopt from South Africa.

The I800-A is pretty straight forward – it is basically confirming some basic information: who are you, who is your spouse, have you been arrested, have you adopted before? It asks for the adoption requirements of your home state, and you need to send some supplementary documents with the applications (proof of existence such as a passport copy, proof of marriage, your notarized home study, etc.). We had it mailed over and are waiting for confirmation via email that it was received (yet another supplemental form that you can fill out).

At this point, we have a notary appointment tomorrow to get the rest of the documents finished in a timely manner. I am hoping that we can send everything in our dossier to our international adoption agency excepting the USCIS I800-A approval by the end of August. D is expecting to be out of the country again starting in September for his work (including two weeks in Paris for some training over Thanksgiving – I would be jealous, but I may go to get and meet up with him for part of it). We are also considering getting POA tomorrow in addition to the notarizations so that if he is out of country when our approval comes in, I can sign for him and get it notarized/apostiled, and sent out before he comes home again.

No clue how long it may take us to get the approval, but I’m secretly hoping we can have the dossier in South Africa by early October. We’ll probably have to do the home study again within 6-8 months – there are some delays happening in country with international adoptions – but at least it will only be an update and all these scary, starter stuff will be behind us!

Phase II – The Dossier

So we are finally at PHASE TWO of this paperwork process. Our family physician gave us a bit of a hard time about the paperwork – he wanted us to come in to follow up on our bloodwork in order to get the medical forms we needed to finalize the home study. Except that we did not really go over anything. We just waited around in the office while he finished up the paperwork, which I had to constantly correct as he and the notary kept forgetting to fill out important sections.

But, now our home study has everything, including the official offer letter for my new job! (That’s right! I am officially a new federal employee, which means benefits and income so we can continue onward with the adoption.) Our social worker has said we can expect our final copy of the home study hopefully sometime next week.

Busy Spring Bees

So busy that I have been too busy to post.

I have now officially graduated from my Masters program. Additionally, I am now officially unemployed as my assistant position at the University finished as well. This should not affect the adoption process as we know it as I am looking for full-time work. Lucky for me, I got a call literally 30 minutes before the graduation ceremony started for an interview this Wednesday! Asking for good thoughts and prayers, whatever you can send! The place I am interviewing with is exceptionally ideal as they have some flexible hours and daycare in the building – this would be great for a family that needs a lot of extra support like ours will.

As for the adoption, we are literally just waiting on the updated medical paperwork for our home study to be officially approved. We’re filling out the I800-A application so that we can mail it immediately. I’m hoping we can get it out soon so that our fingerprinting appointment will come before D goes out of the country for work again.

Will probably have a little more information in a week or two, settling in to cleaning up the house and refiling all our paperwork properly in our office. Our adoption paperwork is a bit scattered due to my finals frenzy, so I’m going to concentrate on pulling that together on my first week off.

Paperwork Procrastination

Gonna be honest and admit that we have done pretty much squat for the adoption since our training a few weekends ago.

I am torn between being frustated with our lack of progress and giving ourselves a break.

From the beginning, we knew it would be a lot of paperwork. Really. I mean, even after our home study is done, there is even more paperwork for the international dossier – we received that paperwork yesterday. For now, all I will mention with regards to the dossier is that the government of South Africa makes you jump through all the hoops.

All of them.