USCIS approval

We received our USCIS approval in the mail! Yippee! The final piece to our dossier puzzle. All of our paperwork is now in Burkina Faso and now we're waiting on translation. Once everything is translated it will go through numerous hands until it reaches the correct set and we'll get a court date. We don't have to be in BF for our court date, which is good because the hearings are often continued. About a month after the hearing we should have the Declaration of Adoption. After that there's more paperwork to be prepared. So much paperwork. We hope to travel in April or May of next year, Lord willing. Can't wait to see Geililu's face in person and get to know who he is.

We finished our home study and sent off our I-800A on Thursday, it was delivered on Friday in Texas. What a relief. One more step down, only 100 more to complete. :-) We received the next packet of info from our agency and now we're working on our dossier. I like having something to do, it helps to take my mind off of what's happening every second of every minute, of every hour, of every day in Burkina. How Geili is doing, what's he eating, how's he feeling, ahhhhhh..........I could go crazy (more crazy than normal). We're very blessed to be in contact with the orphanage director in Yako, Ruth, who's a wonderful lady and cares deeply about the kiddo's. I know she has the children's best interest's at heart so I rest slightly easier this time around. Still, it's difficult to be so far from your baby. I've been told he's quite the ham. Sounds like our family is the perfect fit for Geili!

I read this quote today, it says what my heart feels.

"Children born to another woman call me, "Mom". The magnitude of that tragedy and the depth of that privilege are not lost on me today." - Jody Landers

Burkina Faso

We've started our next adoption journey. So excited. We're adopting from Burkina Faso this time around. We've just about finished our home study and can't wait to apply for our I-800a. We've already been matched with a 4 year old little boy, Geililu. Precious, adorable little boy. I can't wait to give him a big hug and kiss his chubby cheeks!!!!!

Update

It's been a while since I posted anything. This will be my last post as this blog was to update our status on adoption. Our adoption status is now complete (since November 2011) and we're in love with our baby girl. Isabelle (aka Izzy) is a happy girl. She is super ticklish and smiles at everything. Her older cousin Silas will do anything she wants him to, he treats her like a princess. It's adorable. Izzy loves her brother Gai, she imitates him, Gai was her first word. She also knows mommy, poppy, no, yeah, amen, and the list continues. She's having some issue's with speech (nothing major) so she will attending our local school districts early childhood development program in the fall. Our life got so much crazier with 2 kiddo's, I don't know how anyone manages more than 2 - my hat's off to you!! 

Initially she had major intestinal issue's which took a couple months to clear up along with a long time cough. These are common to the orphanage she was in and fortunately they cleared up, I know some of the kiddo's really struggle with these. Our time in RW and Kenya were stressful and I was sick for 3 weeks but we didn't have as many struggles as some families have experienced. In any case, God was really good to us. We had a multitude of people praying for us and we FELT those prayers while we were there. It was amazing. I don't think I've ever felt prayer before, it was powerful.

In Nairobi

I haven't posted anything while we've been out of country, things have been stressful. We arrived on a Sunday. This first week in Rwanda we visited Isabelle every day and all the paperwork and court procedures went smoothly. We didn't get our travel letter on Friday but we asked for special permission to take her until we had the travel letter since we already passed court. My husband left on Saturday so he could be at home with our 4 year old at home. My mom is here and she stayed. We took Isabelle to the hospital on Saturday to have her ears checked out because she was pulling at them. The hospital was great and we left with 4 perscriptions and were told to come back and see the ENT. When we came back and saw the ENT he cleaned out here ears, good times, and she had wax, a bug, and a seed in her ears. Ewwww...

I waited multiple times at MIGEPROF that second week for the travel letter which seemed liked it wouldn'tever appear. And still, no travel letter. We needed the travel letter to get her passport which we needed to have our appt at the embassy. I got sick, very sick. Oh the stress. We got the travel letter on Thursday early morning, picked up the passport at 2:30 after much begging and pleading, had our appt at the embassy at 3:30 and leftfor the airport from there. I was sick at the airport and we thought they wouldn'tlet us get on the plane. Oh more stress but they did and we arrived at our hotel in Nairobi during a very hard rain about 10:30pm. More sickness all night long so my mom took Isabelle to her appt at the IOM for the TB test. On Monday we waited 5 hours to be told her TB was negative but she needed A blood test and a chest x-ray. So another 3 1/2 hours later we were sent home onlyto betold on Tues thatshe needed another test. She gets to have sputum taken 3 days in a row. Tube down the nose to get the sputum. Oh yeah, more fun. I'm sick once again.

Enogh of down in the dumps because Isabelle is perfect. She is more and more comfortable with us every day. She is chubby and adorable. She laughs at everything and is very snuggly. The sisters at HOH are amazing, taking care of all those children and loving every single one. They are very involved in the community as well. Awesome women.

So that's a short synopsis of what has been happening. We go to the embassy on Tues and leave tues evening. Can't wait to get home.

Referral!

We received a referral in our email this morning. We're very excited - it's a girl. We'll be traveling in about 2 1/2 weeks, we can't wait to meet her.

We have our approval letter

We received our approval letter on 8/26. It is dated 8/8 and states that we should be receiving a referral within the next 2 months. We're so excited to be moving on to the next step. Of course the next step is more waiting but we only have one more thing to wait for - to see our beautiful baby's face! We're getting all the paperwork ready that we'll need to bring with us and trying to finish all the projects around the house that we've put off. It seems like this adoption is actually real now.