Almost There!!!!!

We are fingerprinted!!!! I planned to take a picture of us with our blackened fingers outside the local USCIS office......that's about all I can do to make fingerprinting exciting, but the office threw me a curveball. Our fingerprints were digitally taken! I didn't ask to have them taken the old fashioned way for the sake of our picture. I don't want to slow this final step! After almost 17 years in the Navy, I know my background is clean; now we just wait to see what's in Alicia's closet.

We are so close to the end of the paperchase we can taste it! We now wait for the all-important I-171H Form from USCIS once they complete our background check. We will easily wrap up the few remaining items before that form arrives. As soon as we get it, we'll mail our Dossier to America World (our agency). America World will thoroughly review it, walk it over to the State Department for certification, and then ship it to their folks in Ethiopia who begin the beaurocratic process with the Ethiopian government. Surprisingly, America World only takes about a week to get the Dossier to Ethiopia after receiving it. The date of Dossier to Ethiopia (DTE) is the next significant milestone. Then the waiting really begins.


We had a great Christmas with family in Florida, and we wonder how different our next Christmas will be. There is a small chance we will have our son by then. Even though we expect to be DTE by the end of the month, the Ethiopian government shuts down for vacation from mid-August to October. That vacation period makes our chances "small." The silver lining about waiting is we can distract ourselves with moving to San Diego!

Finalized Home Study!!!!!!

This is me with the FedEx envelope as we overnight our finalized Home Study to USCIS. Since it's Saturday, it won't get out until Monday for delivery to the USCIS office in Texas on Tuesday.

This is a significant milestone in our adoption journey. The Home Study is the key ingredient for both the USCIS approval as well as our adoption application (the "Dossier") that is submitted to the Ethiopian government. With the Home Study finalized, we only have three items left to get the Dossier to Ethiopia.

We received the Home Study from our adoption agency (AWAA) today - just 52 days after our Home Study Orientation at the AWAA headquarters in McLean, VA. USCIS needs this to finalize our application. With any luck, we'll get fingerprinted in January and shortly thereafter receive the Immigration approval form (the all-important I-171H Form) that we'll take with us to Ethiopia. This form allows us to legally bring our son into the country for the first time - kind of important! That means we can't lose it while we wait to travel.......which will probably be about this time next year.

AWAA periodically updates the waiting time for the various age ranges of boys and girls who are adopted. Last week's update showed the wait time for infant boys at 4-6 months, considerably shorter than when we first started (about 9-12 months). The official start of the wait time is when the Dossier gets to Ethiopia. That's why we're anxious to complete all of these steps as quickly as possible. If we can get our Dossier to Ethiopia in January, then we may have a referral (the Ethiopian Govt nominating an infant boy to us for adoption) around July-ish.

We're not holding our breath for a referral just yet. We have a lot to do between now and then (just read my mini-tirade in my last posting). We head to Florida next week to spend Christmas with family. With any luck, I can finish shopping before we leave!

Baby Steps with the Paperwork........Almost Done!

9 weeks and 4 days. That's how much time has elapsed since we received the paperwork from AWAA (our adoption agency) to begin this process. Forgive the pun, but we're taking baby steps at this point. AWAA is reviewing our Home Study and will finalize it very soon. We hope to have it in hand by the end of the week so we can forward it to USCIS.

Speaking of USCIS, we received notification in the mail today that they received our I-600A Form. While it is a standard notification, it indicated the next step is a fingerprint appointment. This gives us some slight encouragement that there's a slim hope to get fingerprinted before I leave for Navy schooling in February.

As Christmas fast approaches (I just realized we'll be driving to Florida for the holiday in just 8 days......I've got to start shopping soon) and we continue to make incremental progress on the paperwork and read a couple of the adoption books we've purchased, I realize that it's quite possible we could have our son by this time next year. Following the adventures of other families through their own web sites and the Ethiopian adoptive families Yahoo Group have been invaluable. Their experiences show that we are not even half way there yet; most of them have taken at least 12 months before traveling to Ethiopia for their child. That still seems forever away at this point.

As with all other challenges we have already faced and those still in our future, we will rely on the Lord's strength instead of our own. Luckily for us, our path between here and Ethiopia has plenty of intermediate challenges to get us warmed up: (1) looking for a house to rent in San Diego - a city we barely know, (2) packing and moving everything....again, (3) renting this house while we're in San Diego, and (4) taking command of a ship.

As always, we will rely on your prayers throughout this journey!

There's Always Another Form

So there I was......thinking we were near the end of the paperchase. We indeed are well past the half-way point, but I noticed a major form I had forgotten - the I-600A Form. Fortunately for us, another couple adopting from Ethiopia posted when they had submitted the form.

The I-600A Form is what prospective international adoptive families submit to the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS) to begin the process of applying for an entry visa for the child. Like everything else, this form requires other forms to accompany it. We also have to get fingerprinted again. We've been fingerprinted already for the FBI's background check (which came back clean....scheeewww!). This fingerprinting session is for USCIS to do their own background check, just in case the FBI overlooked something. Of course, this isn't as simple as mailing another fingerprint form......oh nooooooo. We now wait for USCIS to contact us with our appointment. Yes, we'll travel to the local USCIS office and get fingerprinted. I'm just hoping that office isn't three states away.

This is where things could get complicated. I start my Navy school pipeline in February. Therefore, we really need the fingerprinting appointment in January. Here's the other complication - our Home Study isn't finalized yet, and we're not sure if we can get an appointment without the Home Study. Our completed report will be sent to America World next week for finalization. I decided to mail the form without the Home Study in the hopes of getting a fingerprint appointment without it because I figured it couldn't hurt.

We are still super-psyched to have come this far so quickly; keep tabs of our timeline on the right side of our website. We still hope to get the Dossier through the State Dept and to Ethiopia before the end of January. We've come to think that "Dossier" is French for "ginormous packet of forms that requires hundreds of signatures and notarizations."

And no....this hasn't sunk in yet. I think when the Dossier is finally to Ethiopia, we'll begin to realize we'll soon be parents of a wonderful boy.

Almost Complete with the Home Study

We had a great Thanksgiving with my mother visiting. She and Alicia were gracious enough to allow me to cook the Thanksgiving dinner.......all by myself.
With Alicia's expertise on the pie, we had a fantastic dinner. I cooked a bone-in turkey breast with vegetables. I opted to enclose the turkey in a foil tent to keep it moist. I took the additional measure of placing a number of butter pats between the skin and meat. I'm sure that was the key to a moist bird......and a few extra calories!

We're almost done with the Home Study process. Chuck the social worker has conducted all of the visits, and he is now writing up his final report. He expects to complete that sometime next week. After that, he will submit it to AWAA for final review and completion. Only the background checks from the various police agencies are required to finish this stage of the paperchase. We submitted that paperwork a while ago. We must have criminal and child abuse checks by the VA State Police, CA (we briefly lived there a couple of years ago), and also a second check done by the Child Protective Services of VA. Oh......and a fingerprint and background check by the FBI. Needless to say, we hope all of those background checks are processed quickly and get to AWAA to complete the Home Study. With the number of times my background has been checked and rechecked for various security clearances and accesses throughout my Naval career, I just wanted to tell AWAA to trust me that if I had any skeletons, they would have been found by now! I wonder how many background and criminal checks birthparents go through before they welcome their child in their home? The Home Study is only half of the pile of papers we'll submit to the State Department as our official adoption application. We're almost done with the other half. Luckily, we're still on track to complete the dossier before the end of January - about four months after we started this journey - super-quick compared to what we've heard from fellow Ethiopian adoptive families.

With any luck, I'll be able to say our Home Study is finalized in our next posting!

Home Studies are Almost Done!

We must do four Home Studies; the first one was the Orientation back on Oct 28th. We've met with our social worker, Chuck, two times, and the final meeting (the one where he meets with Alicia alone) is next week. Chuck has been very encouraging and has done a great job putting us at ease throughout the entire Home Study process.

Today was the in-home visit with all members of the family, to include Chloe. Chloe was well-behaved during Chuck's visit. In the spirit of making a good impression, I vacuumed last night to get most of Chloe's black hair off our light-cream colored carpet. I wanted to tell Chuck that our carpet is rarely this clean and he should make special note of our cleaning abilities in his final report. This is an especially-tremendous achievement now because the unusually mild weather has transformed Chloe into a four-legged shed monster. Alicia was grateful that I didn't share that detail with Chuck. All in all, it was a great visit.

I must confess the Home Study process is going much quicker than I expected. Chuck met with me last week; he visited the house today, and he'll meet with Alicia next week. It looks like our Home Study final report will be all wrapped up and submitted to AWAA by early December.

The Rowland Coffee Shop is Open!

Just in time for holiday shopping or simply satisfying your caffeine addiction.

If you didn't know, the world's original source of coffee beans was Ethiopia! Last year, a family adopted two daughters from Ethiopia. The father is in the coffee business, and was so captivated by Ethiopia that he now runs a coffee bean supply company specializing in Fair Trade coffee. Part of JustLove Coffee's mission statement is to help families adopting from abroad, specifically Ethiopia, with fundraising.

Whenever you purchase coffee (or other items) through our website, we receive a portion of the proceeds. You can drink Fair Trade coffee...from the birthplace of coffee...and help bring our son home. We are still in the paperchase portion of the adoption process, but we intend to adopt an infant son. It's only a matter of time (and additional paperwork!).

Join us in bringing him home through our new coffee shop!