Well, we finally are getting our home study back from our Social Worker and all of our paperwork will go out tomorrow (along with a fat little check—well not that fat by comparison) to USCIS. This is so that they can approve us to bring an orphan into the country as our daughter. This process has taken us from the last week of March until now (although this last week and a half we’ve been waiting on getting the home study back with all of our other paperwork done).
What now? Well, we wait till we get our fingerprinting date from USCIS (to make sure we are not felons) and after that is done—which should take at least two months, if not three. After that, we should get our i171H approval from USCIS in another 10-12 weeks. From there we will put some other paperwork together with our i171H, take it all to the office of the Great Seal in Lansing and have all of our documents Certified. Then we will send them to Chicago to be Authenticated by the Chinese Consulate. THEN we will be ready to send them to China. Yay!
If this all seems too long to get paperwork done, well it is—but only because of all the hoops we have to jump through—THANKS U.S. GOV! But what can one do? Jump through the hoops.
Anyway, we think that under this time frame the earliest we would have our daughter home would be late fall of 2007. Seems like a long time to wait on a pregnancy, but I guess if it can take elephants almost two years then I guess we can wait a year and a half.