Adoption Update

Everyone has been asking for an update on the adoption, and the truth is there's just not much that's changed since my last "adoption post".  I've continued to update the timeline to the right as any baby milestones have been completed.  So here all that is in paragraph form!

We have completed our parent training which we were allowed to do online so we could finish it as quickly as possible.  We had our last visit with our social worker for our home study, which was the home visit.  It went really well and the highlight was probably Miller asking the social worker if she'd like to smell our dog's bed!  I have NO IDEA where that came from other than she and her brother must hold each other down and force the other one to smell it when I'm not looking.  Miller kept insisting and finally our social worker had say, "um, no thank you!"  That child!!  :)  The social worker said she would go ahead and write our home study and send it on to Holt for their review just minus the sentence that says we have a clear background from the FBI. 

We mailed in our I600a which is a document that begins the immigration paperwork process.  It lets Homeland Security know that the Ethridge's will be adopting and bringing a child into the country permanently.  We then received our I-797C Notice of Action, which is just a very fancy way of saying "this is a piece of paper to let you know that we got your piece of paper (the I600a) and we'll be sending you another piece of paper soon".  The next thing we'll receive from them will be the dates and times for our biometrics appointments downtown (basically another set of fingerprints to be taken for Homeland Security).

So right now, we are still waiting for our original set of prints to be run and a report of a clear background to be returned to us.  If we can get them back in the next few days, we'll still be in position to get a referral from the pool of healthy baby boys that need homes ASAP.  Without this all of the above doesn't really get us anywhere. It's all good that these things have been taken care of - a few less things to do once we do get the report back from the FBI.  But we really can't move forward with getting a referral until we have that.  If we don't get them back in the next few days, basically we're back where we thought we'd be before we got the call a few weeks ago asking if we'd be willing to consider a healthy boy.  Which isn't a bad place to be- we can still get a referral of a special needs child matching our profile at any time and we are still requesting records on babies as they get added to the waiting child list that we're interested in.  We will either have a baby early next year or late next year -  please, won't you join us on the hamster wheel of adoption?  :)