Not the best news

The USCIS refused to expedite our immigration approval onto the National Visa Center however they did go ahead and finish it at their office today. They will be mailing their approval via snail mail to us and the NVC on the east coast (hopefully, they mailed it out today). The NVC will take up to a week to get everything set for J to get his visa in Ethiopia so he can come home. Once we have that approval letter in our hand we need to fax it onto the national BCS office and it's up to them whether or not they will proceed to get us an embassy appointment set without knowing for sure the National Visa Center is done. The risk is that we could end up in Ethiopia waiting on them to approve us and get J his visa home. At this point, Dave and I are willing to take that risk knowing that they only need about a week and if we get a embassy date set it may not be for two weeks. Anyway, now we wait for this letter to come in the mail. If they sent it today from the other side of the mountains there's a chance we could get it tomorrow but then with the holiday on Monday, BCS won't touch it until Tuesday. Please say a prayer that things will move quickly after the weekend. We're ready to go. . .

We got our USCIS approval!

Life has been a little crazy so this post is very late. We got the letter on the 4th of April which was 8 weeks after mailing in the application. We were thrilled. The thing is, we didn't think we wouldn't get approval cause it's pretty for sure but it was just having to wait for 8 weeks that was tough.

Now what? - you might ask

We mailed our dossier to the Secretary of States office in Denver. They are putting a state seal on everything and will be mailing it back. They say it's about a 72 hour turn over so we're expecting it in the mail any day.

Once we get it back we'll make 4 copies of everything then we'll mail it onto our agency. They will add our home study report and mail if off to Ethiopia. This is the most exciting thing thus far! Then we wait.

So, very soon we'll be done with all we can do. Praise the Lord.

Small update

We are still waiting on the approval from USCIS. Bonnie mailed in our application a lot later then we thought she would so we're right at 4 weeks. They say it's typically 6 to 8 weeks so we continue to wait.

We have almost everything done for our dossier. I am trying to get a letter from our family doctor stating that Dave and I are healthy but they're dragging their feet. I'm also working on taking pictures of our house and "family life." Once we get it all together we have to go get everything noterized and state sealed.

We're so close. I am getting so excited to think that we will be in the next and last stage of all this. One day we'll get the call, "We have a baby for you!" YEA!

Moving onto a new set of paperwork

So, we are finally officially DONE with our home study. We can now apply for grants which I started working on today.

We sent our US Citizen Immigration Services paperwork on and that typically take 8 weeks to come back with approval. While we wait on that we start working on the dossier which is a massive stack of papers we have to get signed and most of them need to be notarized and get a state seal. These 8 weeks will pass quickly and I want to have the dossier totally done.

If all goes well the dossier should be off to Ethiopia by March. Then we wait . . .and wait. . .and wait. Only God knows how long. One day we will get a call saying there is a baby waiting for us!

one thing left to get done. . .

So our home study is done. . .except . . . we have to read a book and write a little paper on it. I ordered it online because the local libraries didn't have it. So, we're waiting for it to arrive and then we'll try to sail through it and hopefully get it done before the end of the month. Then we have a couple months of waiting on the USCIS stuff before the dossier (tons of paperwork) is sent to Ethiopia. We're getting so close to being done. Phew!