WooHoo

Our EA was actually sent today instead of Monday! :)

Abbrivation Meanings

For those of you who do not know what the abbrivations stand for here is the run down.

AWA - America World Adoption (Our agency)
HS - Home Study
SW - Social Worker
DTC - Dossier To China (Our home study and all our paper work goes to China)
EA/LOI - Electronic Acceptance/Letter of Intent (Initial Contact letting China know your intent to adopt a certain child)
PA - Pre-approval (China knows your intent and has given you pre-approval for your child!)RA/LOA - Referral Acceptance/Letter of Acceptance (China sends written approval and you send back your acceptance.
TA - Travel Approval (Permission to travel to China)
CA - Consulate Appointment (Needed for childs Visa to become a US citizen)

Tenative EA Date!

Our FC was out of the office most of this week. She returned today and called to let us know that if all went well she expected us to be able to send our EA on Monday! How exciting!!

Blog Redesigned

As you can see we had the blog redesigned. Jenny at Pink Armchair Designs did it for us and worked her tail off! LOL As you can see there is a grab button on our side bar, please do not grab it yet. We are gearing up for our fundraiser soon and will use it for that. We will let you know when the kick off is.

Received One More

We received state #2 clearances today! How is that for super fast! Less than a week with a holiday thrown in the mix. If only state #3 comes that fast! Did I tell you that only half of our home states clearances are back? So frustrating.

Our home study rough draft is with our FC at AW. I had hoped we'd hear some thing today but we did not. Praying we are able to send our LOI/RA by the end of the week. We are getting ready to send the rest of our documents off to the Chinese Consulate to finish the notarization process.

These are the steps we have left before our paper work can be shipped to China.

-State #1 Child Abuse Clearance (we have criminal clearance back)
-State #3 Clearance
-Immigration Finger Printing
-Receive I-800
-Notarize I-800 and Homestudy
-Send documents to Agency
-Agency sends DTC!!!

Mind you this could all still take months. Praying that it does not.

Sending LOI/EA?

It appears that the rough draft of our home study has made it's way to our family coordinator yesterday. That is wonderful news because as soon as she is done reviewing and tweaking it then she will be able to send our Letter of Intent/Electronic Acceptance to China and let them know we want to adopt Evan!

Praying that next week is full of good news. :)

Evan's School

On Monday we visited our State School for the Deaf. I must admit when we pulled up I had to hold back the flood gate of tears. I was overwhelmed with emotions. It finally felt real but after hearing the heartbreaking news that we were further away than we thought we were from getting Evan it was hard.

We spent two hours with the Director of Pupil Personnel Services and a half hour with the schools audiologist. They were the nicest people. Actually everyone we met at the school was super nice. We toured the whole school which is huge by the way! We saw their gym, fitness room, 3 cafeterias (small tables, medium tables and large table) OK I'll stop listing everything because I can go on and on. They do have an indoor pool that the children use as part of their PE. I love that! Did I tell you every child must take music? The music teacher also told us that 85% of the students take a musical instrument by middle school years. How awesome is that! The school also offers a birth to 3 program and then a preschool program for children.

It is a state school so they have to offer residential living. We were able to walk through the dormitories and saw were the students sleep, their kitchen and lounge area. I must say it is all very nice but I'm so glad we live very close to the school. Anyone under 34 miles will be bused to the school everyday. Over that you must stay on campus.

It is very diverse. There are students from Burma, Thailand, Russia, Bosnia, Afghanistan and one more country that I can't think of. I just think it is awesome. We don't have that much in our public school.

I must say we are very glad we took the time to visit the school. I think Evan will really like it there.

Glimmer of Hope

I receive an e-mail yesterday that state #2 received our faxed paper work from our SW. The SW called to make sure it went through OK and the lady said that she would process them by today and have them out in the mail! :) How is that for fast. We should have them by next week.

Unfortunately we have to snail mail the forms for state #3 but our SW is adding a cover letter stating that we are completely done with our home study and waiting on SC to apply for our I-800. Could they please expedite? It's worth a shot. Otherwise it could be weeks before we see those.

Keep those prayers coming as they are doing wonderful things! :) Thanks friends.

Missing Clearances

I know what I write here is a lot of the same from the main blog. Just hang in here with us.

It seems our clearance requests were not sent to two of our previous states on our behalf. So now when our home study is completely finished and waiting for us to get I-800 approval we can't because we don't have out state clearances! I have no idea how much time this will add onto our time line. We are beyond frustrated. We have our whole dossier DONE except our notarized home study and the I-800. :(

There is some good news in all of this mess! As soon as Lauren receives a rough draft of our home study from our SW then we can send in our EA/LOI for Evan! Is that not the best news you've heard all week! I know that is what we are holding onto.

I do know the Lord will work this all out in his time.

Home Study Complete!!

We had our final home study visit this past weekend. We actually finished on our LID anniversary for Lia. All went well and we even thought we had all of our clearances for a brief moment. We only have ONE states. For some reason we are missing two and when I asked fellow adoptive families they all received them from those states in two to three weeks. We are now on six plus weeks! :(

Our social worker is going to look into it for us today. The first clearance reports were sent to the wrong place and the gentleman took three weeks to send them to our SW. I pray that is what happened with the other two state clearance reports. I think I might do some calling myself and see what I can find out.

Tomorrow we go to the School of Deaf to meet with school officials and tour the school Evan will attend. We will actually get to sit in on a class of children his age. :) We are looking forward to that. We are still not having any luck finding a sign language class so we are just learning via DVD.

Could you all pray that we get these clearances figured out and we can wrap up this home study. Hopefully we'll have some good news soon. Could you also pray that we hear some thing back on a sign language class? We are on three or four waiting lists for a class. Thanks!

One More

We have one more home visit with the social worker and we will be done. Well at least on our part. We are still waiting on our finger prints to clear but that will come. This weekend marks our 3 year LID for Lia and Sunday is our anniversary. What better weekend to finish our home study.

Please pray our finger prints will come back soon so we can proceed to the next step.

Waiting....

We are still waiting for our clearance from each state that we've lived in. I've read that it took three months for some adoptive families to come back. That would mean we could still have two months to wait before we could even send in our I-800A.

Good news is we will be done with our HS on the 16th! I can hardly wait. I pray that by the time we are done with the HS our clearances will be back and we will be ready to apply for our I-800A. It won't be long after that we can shout that we will be DTC (Dossier to China)! We are looking forward to that day!

As of right now China is not restricting travel but will quarantine anyone who is thought to be sick with the flu for 7 days. I'm sure we will hear more next week. Praying this will all be over with soon.