Approved..finally

This blog has temporarily been hijacked by James. What does that mean? Expect a dry, to the point blog. Maybe when Jill has a free moment (very few these days) she can add a little humor.

Typical USCIS approval takes 45 days. We need this approval to bring an orphan into the United States. It is also the last thing we need to mail in our otherwise completed dossier. When we hit day 60 on January 10th, we decided to call. Why the delay? Do you need more information? Unfortunately, we were told that since the address was wrong on the original paperwork, our application was put in a holding pattern. Then, USCIS hired temporary workers who passed our paperwork off to someone else. Ugghh..

Thankfully, a few days before we are due to fly to Naples to visit Nana, our approval arrived. The final piece of paperwork we needed to mail off our dossier. So, Friday, our dossier was overnighted to our adoption agency Holt.

So what's next? On Monday Holt will get our dossier. They then have to approve it and then we get put on a waitlist for a referral. There have been some recent changes with Ethiopian adoption which are leading to longer wait times. When we started this process, we were expecting a 3 to 9 month wait, but probably 5 months. With the recent changes, we are told it may take about 12 months. So, why we hoped to bring our child home by the end of this year, we maybe looking at the middle of next year. So now, all we can do is hope that this stage goes quicker than we think. Here is to hope.