No progress

It's been over a month since I sent the notice to the Dept. of Homeland Security asking them to reschedule our finger-print appointment, and we still haven't heard anything back. I've called them twice and left two messages, with no response. In the meantime, I booked our next cruise vacation for Feb. 2012, and we reserved a room large enough to include Logan too, just in case we have him home by then. I've been reading a blog lately, entitled two tots and a teen, and the family just adopted two more adorable little boys from China, ages 3.5 and 18 months. Yes, it made me wonder if we should adopt two more boys again. We have the room, and six is a nice even number. Three teens and three little ones...hmmm. I mentioned the idea to David, and he is thinking about it now too. Elizabeth Rose is in China right now, visiting two orphanages in the Shandong province, where Logan is currently residing. When Elizabeth Rose gets back, maybe she'll have new information about Logan, and maybe she will send us more videos of little boys!

USCIS fingerprints

Well, we finally received the USCIS letter notifying us of our "appointment" to get our biometrics (yes, fingerprints again!) complete at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Buffalo. Wouldn't you know it, the appointment is for when we are on vacation so we have to reschedule. I called the number on the notice to try to reschedule, but I was told I had to return the official Notice of Action with the box checked "Request for Rescheduling." I asked the woman if she could check to see when the next appointment is, so that I can mark it on the calendar, and she said no. We can only ask for a reschedule one time, and we MUST go to that appointment or we'll be denied the next time. Uh oh. We can only hope that the next appointment date that they send us works ok with our calendar. If not, we'll have to move mountains to make the appointment anyway. On another note, the same day that we received the notice for our fingerprint appointment, we also received the form to apply for John and Ben's birth-certificate. Just over a year after our adoption was finalized, I am able to complete the very last form to prove that they are our sons. The birth-certificate will show me as Mother and David as Father!

Contracts all signed

Last week we received the contracts from WACAP to sign. Essentially, we had to agree that we would not hold WACAP responsible if things did not go smoothly, and we had to sign that we read all the material that WACAP sent us about adoption. We had to sign six different forms and mail them back with our first agency payment. We will pay three different installments to WACAP for their adoption services, in addition to the home-study fee and all the fees to the government. I wish adoption was more affordable. I know several families who would adopt if it wasn't so complicated and expensive. On Wed. night I received a call from Elizabeth Rose telling me that we should be receiving another finger-print appointment soon. Yes, we already had our finger-prints taken for this adoption, and several times for adopting Ben and John, but they need to do them yet again. This time we will need to go to the immigration department in Buffalo. As soon as we get our finger-print appointment (and go to Buffalo) we can pursue our I-800A approval. Then the entire packet gets sent to China. Hopefully, they will still let us use our dossier from last year and we won't have to re-do that big mountain of paperwork!!! That will save us months and months, and quite a bit of money too. I read today online that China is making the post-placement and pre-placement requirements more arduous. We will have to have six post-placement visits from the social worker (instead of two) and provide letters from Logan's teachers saying that we are good parents. The social worker will even have to visit us two and five years after the adoption!! Yikes! What a whole lot of effort we adoptive parents put forth. It's worth it though. Look at how well John and Ben are doing!

I-800A

I received a call yesterday from Elizabeth Rose. She is now in charge of our paperwork, now that our home-study is complete. Elizabeth Rose called to say that we are officially accepted into the China program! Elizabeth also needed us to fill out another form, send her copies of our tax returns from the last two years, along with a check for $890 made out to the USICS. Our I-800A form, the check and our home-study needs to be sent to the US. Department of Homeland Security. It took me awhile to realize that the USICS and the Dept. of Homeland Security are one and the same thing. I don't know what the acronym USICS actually stands for, but I now understand that the Department of Homeland Security is where the I-800A and I-800 are processed. The I-800A is the Application for Determination of Suitability to Adopt a Child from a Convention Country. The I-800 is Petition to Classify Convention Adoptee as an Immediate Relative.

shopping!

The other day, Ben and I went to Rochester to a Dr. appointment at Strong Memorial Hospital to see the pulmonary specialist. On the way there, we stopped at a store to shop and to have a few photos printed up to give the Social Worker for her next visit on March 18th. While we waited for the photos, we wandered around the store. On the shelf near the photo lab, there was a toy that when dropped or banged on, it lit up. Ben recognized the toy immediately as the same type of toy that Logan was playing with in the video that we saw! Ben decided we should buy two of these types of toys to mail to Logan in China. We also purchased an inexpensive digital camera to send to him too. We know he might not actually receive these gifts, and we can't mail them to him yet because China has not yet approved the adoption, but it was fun to shop for Logan for the first time.

home study almost done!

We received the first draft of our home-study by email today! Hooray! We just need to sign and return the form saying that it's correct, and then it will be sent to WACAP for review. Once the home-study is accepted, we'll be officially accepted into the China program and submitted for approval. Our social worker, Sue, has to come visit us again on March 18th, and then we're done seeing her for a little while. In the meantime, we wonder if Logan will like skiing, taekwondo, basketball, running, swimming and boating. We are such an active family, always on the go, that we hope Logan likes to be busy too. We skied with Ben all day today, and we are looking forward to teaching Logan how to ski too! This week we are buying a new (and bigger) van. Now that we know that we really will have five boys, we decided that we needed an even larger car. Most vans and SUV's fit seven passengers, but we always seem to take at least one friend with us where-ever we go. This weekend, John's friend Tyler is over for the entire weekend. We went skiing today, and we'll go skiing again tomorrow. So yes, we need a van that is almost as large as a school bus!

Almost two months now!

Already it's been almost two months since we put in the application to adopt Logan. Today I emailed our social worker to ask if she received all the documents she needs. She has, but she's out of town. She promises to finish up our home-study by the end of next week. So, in case someone is reading this and is wondering about the time-frame to adopt, a home-study takes at least two months. Things could go faster, but not much. We already had a previous home-study from which to work, and we had all the documents completed. When we adopted Ben and John, it took us about five months to complete the home-study phase. On another note, this past weekend we took the kids on a ski trip to Holiday Valley. David and I had to stay with Ben on the beginner hills, and the other three big kids went off on their own to tear up the mountain. It reminded us again of why we decided to adopt Logan. The teens are all growing up so quickly, and Ben is going to need a brother his own age. We hope that we are able to go get Logan before next ski season! We wonder if Logan has ever even seen snow, since he is in a province about 5 hours south of Beijing. Ben and John had both seen a little snow before, but nothing like the amount of snow that we receive here in the winter. Ben was just enraptured the first time we had a significant snowfall. We hope Logan likes to ski too!