Still a glimmer of hope!

Well the good news is our dossier arrived in Ukraine! The bad news is it was about 30 minutes too late... and still not fully translated.

So through the friend of a friend, a man from a church in Keiv, Ukraine is meeting with some high ranking government officials on Thursday to ask them to consider accepting our dossier so that we do not have to wait until February to submit. That is our last chance. If they accept we will travel in January-Feb. If they do not we cannot submit until Feb and will travel in March/April. So we need a Thanksgiving miracle.. please keep praying for that!

We had a great visit with the McSorley family in Columbus this past weekend. Our kids really enjoyed playing with their cousins and spending time with their aunts and uncles (and grand parents of course!). Lots of driving though... and when you have 2 young boys who think it is really cool to pee outside, you can bet we made lots of stops along exit ramps. I think I said "just don't hit my shoes" at least 100 times over these past few days!

It is in the mail...

Well after a few issues yesterday, we finally sent our dossier in the mail yesterday! I drove to Springfield to have it all apostilled. Right before Meg and I got there our agency realized we had never gotten or filled out our Power of Attorney for our facilitator in Ukraine. So we had to deal with getting that form printed, signed, notarized apostiled and shipped off too... all while several hours from home! But thanks to some very kind people, and a husband who got in the car and drove when he heard the stress in my voice, all is okay.

Now we just have to hope and PRAY that the package arrives in Ukraine in time for it to be submitted by the November deadline. We do not want to have to wait until Feb before it is submitted!!! We are hoping to travel by that time.

So that is the update. We are leaving in about 12 hours for an early Thanksgiving with the McSorley family in Ohio. We'll be back on Sunday and Monday we'll know if things are moving ahead in our journey to adopt Alina of if we are in a several month holding pattern.

Keep those prayers coming!
Anne

GREAT NEWS!!!

Thanks to the hard work of our friends at the local congressmans office (as well as our Congressman himself) our I-171H has arrived!! It is nothing short of a miracle!!

So tomorrow I will scan and send all our forms to our agency in CA for one last review, then once I get the okay I will drive everything to Springfield to have it apostilled and then shipped to Ukraine. It looks like we might make the Nov 29th deadline for the year.

There is a chance we could have Alina with us by her birhtday on Valentine's day! How wonderful would that be!

So keep those prayers, love and support coming... they are truly helping to work miracles in our situation!

So where we are today...

Brief review...Todd and I filed our I-600A in late July/early August. At that time we received a letter stating that our home study had not been submitted nor had our DCFS letter of recommendation. We knew that both of these had not been submitted. We were fingerprinted in Naperville on Thursday, August 21st.



On September 25th I received an email from Cathy who is our case worker for our home study. She stated our Home Study had been approved by the state and was being sent to Immigration that day. Both the Home Study and letter for support from DCFS were mailed that day.



Since that date we have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of our 171-H form (the outcome of filing our I-600A) so that we may process our paperwork to adopt. When a month passed and we didn’t hear anything we had our local congressmans office inquire about the status of our paperwork. Late last week I received a fax from Immigration that states they have our I-600A, but have not received the necessary Home Study and DCFS endorsement letter so there is nothing for them to process. They cannot move forward until this necessary paperwork is provided.

So the bottom line is that all the documentation that was mailed on Sept 25 was never recieved. Last Friday we resubmitted the info, our Congressman called Immigration on our behalf and we are waiting to hear our status.

We are really frustrated and upset about all of this... but grateful that our friend in the Congressmans office pushed us to let them check into it for us (thanks Nate!) Who knows how long we would still be waiting...

So if you have any prayers for a speedy turn around, we could certainly use them. We are still hopeful that our dossier will be submitted by 11/29, but each day that passes lessens that hope.

Things on the homefront are fine. Noah had an ear infection last week and Caleb has some sort of coughing cold thing that is keeping him (and most of us) up at night. Hopefully it won't spread to the rest of the family and he'll feel better soon.

Had a quiet weekend at home. I would say we were enjoying football but I can't say that... stupid Iowa! I hate those Hawkeye's!!!!