Update on the physical and the next step

Yea! Courtney's completely healthy! All tests for weird diseases came back negative (you were right, Lindsey!) and we are turning in my physical form to the SW today. We have one more piece of paperwork to get to her (which should be in on Monday), and then we're hoping she'll be able to finish up the HS in the next week to week-and-a-half. Then we'll turn in our HS to the INS to complete our I600A file. Looking back over the blog, I see we've neglected to mention the I-600A. The I-600A is a request to bring a foreign orphan to reside in the US. We filed that at the very beginning, right after our first meeting in Louisville. It includes a form with basic information including where you're adopting from and how many kids--this is important...we CANNOT bring back more than 2 kids, because that's what we stated we wanted to be approved for on our I-600A (if it was up to Courtney, we'd bring 3 or 4 home!). We also had to include certified copies of our marriage license and birth certificates when we turned that in. Everyone wants copies of those. :) BUT, our file is not complete until we have turned in our HS. Once we have done that, we will be fingerprinted and checked out through the FBI (the cool digital fingerprints--we already had ink ones done for the state). So we paid INS $665, which includes the fee for filing the I-600A ($525) and the fee ($70 each) for both of us to have biometrics run (the really cool digital fingerprints). Once we have everything in to the INS* and are fingerprinted, we will wait for their approval that we can adopt. This approval comes in the form of a I-171H letter, and Ukraine will not let us adopt without that approval.

*We are using the term "INS" (Immigration and Naturalization Service) because that's what more people are familiar with. The new name for INS is "BCIS" (Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services), which was changed when the Dept of Homeland Security was started. INS and BCIS refer to the same govt organization, but we will use INS for simplicity here.