There are many things in life that can teach us patience and the adoption process is defiently one of those things. Our agency refers to the paper collecting phase as the "paper pregnancy" and is just that. It takes time to prepare everything just like it take time for a baby to grow in the womb. One of the exceptions is that with this "pregnancy" I don't have to gain weight! (sometimes you gotta look for the rainbow in situations).
Well since my last post we found out that our Home Study was approved by our agency! Yay :) We received 3 notarized copies, 1 for the Dossier, 1 to keep and 1 that we sent to the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) This is the next phase in our waiting process. We have been warned by our agency that the time frame for the USCIS to process our paperwork from start to finish can be 1-3 months. This process includes them sending us a letter with an appointment for biometric fingerprints and than we receive a very important letter that is one of the most important documents that we will travel to China with. It will allow us to bring our baby girl back with us! So even though we are possibly three months away from receiving this very important letter the good news is that once we do receive it than we will have all the documents needed to complete our dossier. We have learned that baby steps our better than no steps at all.
As we wait for the government to check us out we have begun transitioning our home to make room for our new addition. It has always been the plan to have Pat's current office space as our second child's room. So we are making some changes and small renovations to go ahead and move Pat's office downstairs ( which I think he is totally stoked about). We are not naive in knowing that we may be waiting awhile for a referral for a child but we also don't want to wait and than be rushing to get everything done at one time. It melts my heart to walk into Pat's office now and know that one day we will finally have another child sleeping there.
This room is just across from Cameron's and he is very excited that their rooms will be so close. He has already told me how he will help her feel safe if she gets scared at bedtime. I can't wait for him to be a big brother!
So as we still have time to go, looking back at where we started we can see how far we've come. We can't control how long a lot of this process takes so we wait knowing that God already knows the day, and the hour that our child will be put into our arms.
