Homestudy in Process...

It has been a really really eventful week. Eventful enough to make my head spin and require some deep breaths so as to not panic.

I will keep this post only on the topic of Homestudy and Ethiopia adoption things for the sake of not overwhelming you my reader! I'll leave taxes, fundraising, and Haiti out of this one.

So for the majority of the month of January, Lucas and I were camped out up in Minnesota seeing family and friends. During our time there, we got some bulk emails from Holt both on the Homestudy (United States) front and also the Ethiopian program details.

Our process for this child will differ than Lucas' in that we will be working on the Homestudy and Dossier concurrently rather than one at a time. We found that we needed to get additional letters (signed and notarized of course) from some Dr's in Minnesota regarding Ted's cancer history on top of our regular letters for safety. It took a lot of phone calls and messing around, but these have all been obtained! Ted also saw his physician here in Missouri and got all of his documents (and HIV screen) taken care of. You would all be happy to know that Ted does not have HIV :-)

Now that I am home, it is my turn to do all such things. I go to the Dr tomorrow for all of my papers.

We have a slight predicament in that we need to obtain a Minnesota form for background checks. No idea how to get that yet. So far nobody in Minnesota wants to help out. Turns out I'll have to do some whining. Please keep this part in your thoughts that his particular piece of red tape will work out.

We will be scheduling one first round of fingerprints here in Missouri this week. We are hoping to have everything that we can control at least in process in the next few weeks. All of that has to be done and returned and cleared prior to our 2 visits with our social worker from Holt. We are really hoping to have all of these paperwork pieces done by the end of March. That is the current timeline we are shooting for.

For those of you who remember my posts on our old caring bridge website for Lucas, there were times of high stress and processing.. and times for sitting around waiting for stuff to come back.. and months of waiting for a referral. As overwhelmed as I am (and trying to figure out how I did this all before but don't seem to remember much of it now) I know there will be plenty of months later where we will just be here waiting for a referral.. and then waiting for court.. and then waiting for approval to travel.

We love you very much baby Sibley #2 :-) We think you might already be born or be born soon based on what we know of the children in the program and the wait. Be safe and we will get there as soon as God says its time :-)