Where we are at!

This past week, we were getting more paperwork ready to turn in at our individual homestudy appointments. We each had to meet individually with our social worker, right after each other. So we finished a big chunk of paperwork and turned that in. The majority of our paperwork was for DCFS (Dep't of Children & Family Services. Here in Illinois, you have to be approved for an adopt-only foster home. That is in case, something happens and only one parent ends up traveling. We both are planning to go to Vietnam, but they still require it, in case something happens at the last minute After our individual appointments, we went through the document checklist and we are doing quite well with things. We still need to get local police clearances on each of us (we go to the local police department, they run a search with our names and find that we have no record of anything in this town. We also separately are getting police clearances by the state and the FBI.), we need to turn in our petition to adopt a foreign orphan, which we send to the Immigration Service (USCIS - here we will be fingerprinted again!), provide copies of our passport (we are still waiting on those. I just checked and it says, we should get them around the 17th, originally it had said we should get them around the 11th, but not surprisingly since passports are now needed for travel in Mexico and Canada, the time has been extended another week.), I still need to send verification of some our financial statements. (I forgot to include some of the statements, when I turned in our financial declaration, which listed our assets and liabilities. Thank goodness, we own a house, even if we still owe a lot; also they count any life insurance you may have as well as any retirement savings.), we also need to have our physicals, so we can have our medical report sent in (Mine is scheduled for next week and Kevin's the following week.) Then the home study report and a couple miscellaneous documents will be done either at the home visit or sometime shortly afterwards. After the homestudy report is finished, it can be sent to Immigration to be included with our petition and then once we are fingerprinted, we wait for final approval from USCIS (Those not in adoption circles, I defined what USCIS is, anyone remember? Hint it can be found in this blog entry.) Well, tomorrow is a busy day. Although it is Saturday. We have to be up early to go to an adoption conference in St. Charles about 45 minutes away; so I guess I better finish and go to bed!