A Second Miracle Along the Way!

We received our CIS approval today!!!!!!!! Yes, you are reading that correct... We are now the proud owners of our I-797 approval form!! As mentioned last week, I was told that this approval could take at least 8 weeks to come through. So, you can imagine my shock when I opened up the mailbox today and saw a suspicious looking envelope from the Department of Homeland Security. Our approval date on the form was January 24th, which meant that they received, reviewed and approved our home study before the stated 10 business day wait was even over. We are beyond thrilled and so thankful to the Lord for such a speedy approval.

There are a few other documents that I have to complete before we can send everything to Russia. My goal was to have them ready before we received our CIS approval, but since it came so very fast they are not finished. I had to re-create 5 of them using a given template from Children's Hope and enter in the information for our family. Tomorrow, I have to get a certified copy of our marriage license and make copies of our passport picture pages and the I-797 form. Last, I need a new copy of a form that I had received from our home study agency that had an error. I emailed Amy (sw at Lifeline) about this and hopefully she can put that in the mail tomorrow. I may need another document from Lifeline, but CHI is checking into that and will let me know.

So, once I get all of these documents together, they have be notarized. Then, they have to be apostilled, which is basically receiving state certification that the notary(s) on our documents is legit. In order to do this I have to take them to Montgomery. My goal is to be able to do this on Monday. If all goes according to plan, I will be able to mail everything to Children's Hope on Tuesday!!

I just can't believe it! We are going to get to start the "real" and most rewarding wait SO. MUCH. SOONER. than I had ever hoped! I am so thankful to the Lord for this blessing - it brings me some much needed joy and encouragement about this journey we are on.

Thank you so very much for your prayers. I hope so much that the next part of our journey goes as fast as this past month. Wow!!

A Much Needed Miracle Along the Way...

We received some wonderful news yesterday! I'll let you read a portion of the email that I received from our social worker at Lifeline...

Zac and Allison,

Just wanted to let you know that I received the letter today from DHR stating that your home study was forwarded to CIS on Friday, January 11, 2008. They state that they have ten business days before it officially starts the processing.

Why is this such great news, you ask? Well, as explained in this post, the state of Alabama requires that all home studies be approved first through DHR before they can be forwarded on to CIS (Citizenship and Immigration Services) - others (who don't live in AL) are able to send their home studies straight to CIS and avoid this extra step. We were told to expect the DHR approval stage to take about 4 weeks and this is with the "fast" lady (our sw told us that the lady that does "B" last names is quicker than others - some people can expect to have to wait up to 6 weeks). Our home study was mailed to DHR on Friday, January 4th and probably arrived in their office on Monday, January 7th. Well, as you can read in the email from Amy, it was processed and approved in 5 days!!!!!!!!!! As you can imagine, I was pretty floored yesterday to receive this news and so very thrilled. I never expected for it to be processed that quickly, and I am so thankful!

As you can also read in Amy's email, she mentioned (which I didn't know) that it will take 10 business days before CIS starts processing our home study. I feel like that 10 days should end today, because if DHR mailed our home study on Friday, Jan. 11th, it probably arrived in their office the following Monday (Jan. 14th). So, if the 14th was the first business day, then today should be the 10th.

On Monday, we were told that the Atlanta CIS office is taking at least 8 weeks to process home studies. I was expecting (and hoping) it to take about 4 weeks. I was pretty sad to learn about the 8 week time frame. As a matter of fact, I was going to write a post about this on Wednesday, but ran out of time. I was really feeling down about all of this waiting and doubting if I had the strength to do it. So, that is why I titled this post "A Much Needed Miracle Along the Way." I desperately needed something to be easy and to go quickly. The Lord is always faithful to give us the strength and grace that we need, and I am so thankful that God chose for our little "strength boost" to come in this way.

I do have a one concern, though, that you can pray about. If you remember from this post, we had to send a modified copy of our home study to DHR with some very important changes. This copy should have arrived at DHR on Thursday, January 10th - only one day before it was forwarded on to CIS. Please just pray that they approved and sent to CIS the copy that contained the changes and not the original version.

At this point the only thing that we need now is our I-171H, sometimes called the I-797 form, which is our approval from CIS. Once we receive this in the mail, we can send everything to Russia and officially begin waiting for a referral. I am so ready to be at this point, because at least our waiting will count towards bringing home a child!

With the expected 8 week time frame, we should receive our CIS approval around the end of March. PLEASE, PLEASE, pray that we would receive another "miracle along the way" and that our approval would come MUCH quicker than that. I have hopes that it can and know that God can do it!

Thank you so much for praying for our DHR approval to be quick! I am grateful that the Lord chose to answer these prayers exactly as we had hoped. I'll let you know when I hear something!

Adoption Benefit Yard Sale!

On Monday night, I sat down with my good friend Lesley to "brainstorm" about our upcoming yard sale. I knew that a yard sale would be a good, fairly easy, inexpensive fund raiser for our adoption expenses. When our paperwork is finally approved by everyone (DHR and CIS) and we send those and other documents to Russia, we also have to send along a nice fee to our agency! So, we decided that now would be a good time to start working towards a spring yard sale to help cover some of those costs. Tentatively, we have scheduled the yard sale for Saturday, March 1st. We'll get started at 7:00am and most likely close up around noon - or whenever people stop coming.

The biggest thing that I am working on right now is trying to come up with items to sell. We do want the items available that day to be in good working condition so that most of the items sell - which means a higher profit for us. So, if you have any "gently used" items that you would like to donate to sell in our yard sale, please let me know! I know that many of you do not live in our area, but if you know that between now and then that our paths may cross, keep that in mind (Birmingham friends - we will be there in a few weeks). Our Yukon is good for hauling things that you might want to get off your hands. :)

We are also hoping for our adoption t-shirts to make their big debut at the yard sale, as well as selling coffee and baked goods, too. We may even sell raffle tickets for a nice/big item or two. We'll see what comes in.

Finally, since we've never attempted anything like this before, if you have any good suggestions on how to have a successful yard sale, or any other ideas, please let us know! Also, please let us know if you would like to contribute to this event in anyway. Some of our needs include: contributing items, making baked goods, helping with organization and planning, volunteering to work the day of, donating other practical items needed for the day of - tables, signs, etc., helping sort and price items, etc. We can use all the help we can get! And...of course you are all invited to attend the yard sale and hopefully stock up on some good things!

We'll keep you posted on things as they progress. You can pray for wisdom as we plan - and for March 1st to be a good, not-too-cold, rain-free day!

Home Study Update

Well, we hit a little bit of a bump in the road with our home study. We received a copy of it last Saturday and after reading through it we found some things that needed to be corrected. We've worked with our social worker this week to fix the errors, and I received our new copy yesterday. It looks good and everything is fixed!

However, it did mean that we had to send a new copy to DHR (which should have arrived yesterday). I really don't know if this will cause a problem/delay or not. They did have a copy of the home study already, so hopefully if our turn came around before the new copy arrived they went on and started reading through it. I also hope that they throw away the wrong copy and don't use that one to either review themselves or forward on to CIS. Please just pray that everything will go smoothly there and that we would receive their approval very soon. It is still likely to take around 4 weeks, but we are hoping and praying for less.

Thanks for your prayers! I'll update when we know more.

GOOD... LUCKY ?

My good friend Calley is leaving the ultrasound department at the hospital. Today was her last day, and as a gesture of appreciation we all chipped in for a cookie cake from Kroger.

To their credit they spelled her name right. And, perhaps, "Good Lucky" is a common phrase often used in the Kroger bakery department. For example, "Good Lucky concealing your illiteracy from our store manager" or "Good Lucky with your random drug screen on Friday".

So, in my opinion, there has to be some level of congnitive ability consistent with opposable thumbs... And, as a result, one must assume that a trained seal is not responsible for the cake decorating...

A trained seal would have spelled it correctly...

What can we learn from this? Well, first, there is urgent need for national registry exam for cake decorators, specifically, those who write words with icing. Secondly, that exam could probably just be the high school graduation exam. Thirdly, you can rest your head on your pillow tonight knowing that no matter how ignorant, dumb, or stupid you may think, at times, you are... It can never, ever, ever dare stand in the brilliant, deafening, catastrophic incompetence of the person who writes the messages on the cakes at your local grocer.

In closing, I would like to say that this coming Fall, the dear lady or noble chap that put his delicious ink to this savory canvas with his giant steel tipped quill will, no doubt, take time from the craft they have mastered so beautifully and travel to their local polling station and cast their vote for their chosen presidential candidate. And with every ounce of confidence I have, I assure you it will not be for the Grand Old Party.

Good Night, and Good Lucky.

-zac

Sleepy Pup

Last night Gracie fell asleep in the chair in our living room. Turn Up the Volume and enjoy the snoring. At times she is like a two year old, at other times she is like an elderly woman.

And Yes, we just became that couple that puts their dog on their Christmas card and makes videos of them because they are so darn cute... I feel like nothin' but a yankee hippie.

-zac

Home Study Update

I just got an email from Amy at Lifeline. Our home study was officially finished today and mailed to DHR in Montgomery!! Please pray for it to arrive safely and on-time (I'm thinking that it will arrive by Monday). Also, please pray that the person assigned to our case would work quickly and efficiently. It would be so wonderful for this step in the process to be a fast one! I'll keep you updated with any news that comes in the future.

So, where are we now?

There are several things that have happened over the past month, so I just wanted to update everyone on our adoption progress. First, our home study is finished!! Yeah! This was quite an ordeal, and we are very glad that it is done. Our social worker, Amy, finished writing everything up and sent us the final copy on the 21st of December. We looked over everything and made a few changes and then she sent a copy to Children's Hope for them to approve on the 27th. They looked over everything and sent the changes back to Amy right before the New Year's holiday.

The next step is for DHR in Montgomery to approve our home study and then they will send it on to CIS (see this post). I was a little confused about this step because I hadn't heard of anyone else having to do this. I talked with my contact at Children's Hope and she said that Alabama is the only state that she knows of that requires a home study to be sent to DHR before it can be sent to CIS. Everyone else can just send it straight to CIS.

The disadvantage that we have is that this will require probably an extra 4 weeks. If we could send our home study to CIS now, we'd receive our approval from them much earlier, which means we would start waiting for our referral earlier. So, we were bummed to hear about this extra step, but there's really nothing we can do to change it. However, I've seen where some people have had their home study processed very fast (1-3 weeks), so PLEASE pray that this will be the case for us. I emailed Amy today and our home study should be sent to DHR tomorrow!

If everything goes at the pace we are expecting, then we should be able to send our paperwork to Russia by the end of February. At this point, we'll begin the official wait for our baby boy! We are so ready to be at this stage. Please pray that this will come much quicker than expected and that we won't run into any delays.

There is really not a whole lot that we have to do now. The only things left are for us to complete a few registration documents and have everything (home study included) notarized and apostilled. The apostille process is basically where the secretary of state office (in Montgomery) certifies that our documents have been notarized by a legitimate notary republic. EVERY page of our documents have to have be apostilled, though, so we'll have a lot to send - probably around 20/25 pages. All we have to do, though, is mail these documents to Montgomery - and for the very low fee of $5 a page - they'll take care of the rest!

We also have to watch a video series on adoptive parenting called "Because They Waited". There are four seminars to watch and after each we have to take an on-line test. The first three are multiple choice, but the fourth one is short answer. The tests are simply just to prove that we did watch the videos, although we do have to make an 80% or higher. It really shouldn't be too hard, though.

Lastly, we are beginning to think more about fund raising. There are several things in the near future that we hope to do like selling T-shirts, yard sales and maybe even selling cook books. We are also very close to sending out general support letters. Please pray that God would bless these efforts and that He'd provide the needed funds.

More to come on everything soon...Keep checking for updates.

Happy New Year!

We brought in the New Year with a few friends and watching the Auburn Tigers beat Clemson. I think that's a pretty good combination! Happy 2008!