Waiting, Waiting, Waiting but mostly Waiting on Paperwork!

Friday, I mailed off some more paperwork to various agencies: another set of our fingerprints for the Illinois State Police Bureau of Investigation and pretty much the same information that we sent earlier to the Dep't of Child and Family Services for a child abuse clearance. I also sent our I-600A along with a hefty cashier check, so CIS (Citizenship & Immigration) can start opening a file. Probably not much will be done until they receive the homestudy, but at least they might actually make a file for us and one can only hope that this office will issue fingerprinting (YES, more fingerprints) appointments for us. Our social worker though cannot send off our homestudy until they have received a bunch of different paperwork from various governmental agencies, the FBI, the ISBI, DCFS. At least, they have copies of our passports since those are the 1st things we sent for and hopefully the rest will be coming soon.

This will just be the start of our wait though. We will be waiting for one thing or the other all the time until we finally get home with our child from Vietnam. 1st we waited to be application to be approved by our agency, now we are pretty much waiting for all the paperwork, so our home study can be copmpleted and sent to CIS. After that we'll be waiting for our ginger print appointment and then after that to get governmental approval to adopt a foreign orphan. This is when we get our 171-H form. This important piece of paper gives us the final approval to be put on our agency's waiting list for a referral of a child. This will probably be the longest of all our waits. I believe, a few months before our agency thinks we will get a referral, they will have us start some more paperwork which is called our dossier. This will then be sent to Vietnam. Once we have received a referral of our child and have accepted it. We will wait some more to get travel approval, and other important dates that will occur when we are in Vietnam. The link to the left titled Adoption Buzz is extremely interesting as it explains many of the processes involved in adopting from Vietnam.

The latest update from our agency says that their are currently 6 families traveling in Vietnam and another 40 are waiting to travel. No referrals were received so far this month, but they are hopeful that there will be some soon. Hopefully some of the paperwork will start drifting into our agency. Also, we finally got our local police clearance letters from the local police station and I will be sending that to our social worker tomorrow.