Adoption Update

I have had some people ask lately what is happening with the adoption process, so I will give you a little update. Let's just say this process is sloooooooow. I knew I needed to work on patience and believe me- this is really testing my patience! So remember how we filed our I-800a form at the beginning of May? Well, supposedly it takes about 8 weeks to get approval. We are on week 11 and no approval yet. UGH. We were summoned for fingerprints about three weeks after we filed, so I thought that was a really good sign...but apparently not.

I have been checking the mail faithfully every day waiting for that one little envelope to arrive. Well, Friday seemed to be my lucky day. I opened the mailbox and there was a letter from USCIS! I was sure it was our approval. Well, it wasn't. Instead, it told us that our home study was not completed by a Hague approved agency and that we need to submit evidence that it has since been approved by a Hague accredited agency. That day was a rough day and this was enough to send me over the edge. I cried.

I never knew that our home study had to be written by a Hague accredited agency. I knew that our adoption needs to be facilitated by a Hague accredited agency because Ecuador is part of the Hague Convention, but the home study was the initial phase and I didn't realize that they also needed to be Hague accredited. There are only three Hague accredited agencies in Utah, by the way, and one of them is LDS Family Services, the agency I work for. We don't even do international adoption in any sense, so it is funny that we are Hague accredited. We don't write international home studies and plus having my own agency write our home study seemed to be a conflict of interest. The other two agencies are in St. George and Ogden, I think. I didn't even consider having one of these two agencies do our home study because of the distance, but I might have if I had known it was important!

Well, I stressed about it all weekend. But luckily the fix is easy. Our agency, Joshua Tree, (out of Florida), is Hague accredited, and all she needs to do is write a letter stating that she has reviewed our home study and that it is approved through her agency. But still, this delays the process some. So that has been frustrating.

I am just trying to throw all timelines out the window. At first, we thought we would have MF home sometime this summer. Then we thought it would be this fall. Now I am thinking we will be lucky to have her home before Christmas. It seems crazy that we started this process almost a year ago! It was October 2010, so it will be a year here in a few months.

From here, we still need to submit our dossier with all the documents, then we file another form for immigration, the I-800. If that takes as long as this one has....I don't even want to think about that.

We are also still waiting to hear from one grant program, though we are really not holding out much hope that we are going to get a grant. I know there are so many families applying and so many with needs, I don't know how they choose.

So there is the update. Not much. Believe me, I will be posting all sorts of exclamation points when something actually does happen!