FBI, here we come...

We are once again so impressed by the St. Louis INS office! Our HS was turned in last Friday around 11am, and in the Tuesday mail was our fingerprinting appointment! Our official appointment is Friday, June 1, but we are unable to go then, so we will be fingerprinted first thing in the morning on Wednesday, June 8. If the St. Louis INS office keeps up this pace, we'll be in Ukraine before the end of the summer! (that's mostly a joke--we're still planning on traveling in December, for a number of reasons, including our schedules, availability of appointments at the NAC, and flight options...don't want to scare anyone. ;) )

We have been making progress on turning our second bedroom into a second bedroom. I realize that statement only makes sense if you have seen the second bedroom, which has been a mess for quite a while. Originally it was the office, and so we have had to move the filing cabinet and computer into our bedroom. Somehow it didn't seem like a good idea to leave the computer in the toddlers' bedroom... :) So now the second bedroom has what will be the changing table, two twin mattresses, a dresser, a bookcase, and a chaise lounge that will be moving as soon as we can figure out where to put it--somewhere in the living room. We have lots of room but it's hard to decide how best to use it! It's exciting to see the room actually begin to take shape and realize that this will be our children's room.

HS turned in!

Last Friday we turned in our HS to the INS!! Very friendly worker there, and very helpful! There was almost no one else there, so it looks like midday on a Friday is a great time to go to the St. Louis INS office. We turned in our HS and asked when we would be fingerprinted. We've gotten a few different answers on this--3 weeks (from the office that we turn the HS in to but that doesn't actually process the I600A), a week and a half to two weeks (from the office that processes the I600A), and just under 2 weeks (from a woman here in StL who turned in her HS at the beginning of May). Unfortunately, they schedule fingerprints on Fridays, which is not a good day for us as we are at work and can't take off. Fortunately, if you can't make your Friday appointment, you can come any Wednesday after your original appointment, and Wednesdays are a day that we are able to get off of work!!
Thanks for your continued prayers! We seem to be in a really great place to do an adoption for a number of reasons, but we have heard from numerous other people that other INS offices can take a really long time to process I600A's. Please pray that all of our fingerprints/paperwork would go through quickly and easily. If you don't mind, please pray as well for the many other families also in the adoption process. There are a lot of places that things can get hung up (both in the US and abroad), and it is a long, tiring process. Don't worry--we've got a lot of perseverance between the two of us, although most of you who know us would just call us stubborn! :)

Completed homestudy!

We got a call on Tuesday afternoon from our SW that our HS is completed! It was absolutely perfect timing since Mark has Wednesdays off from his clinicals, and we were able to go pick it up. Unfortunately, we still need to turn it in to INS and were not able to do that yesterday. We had actually made an appointment earlier in the week for Friday, anticipating that we might get our HS this week. So we have an appointment set up for Friday morning to turn in our HS. Then we need to be fingerprinted (which won't happen for a week or two) and then we wait for our INS approval letter (our I-171H). So much waiting, but we're getting closer to being done every day!

Baby steps (and beds)

There's nothing like major purchases to start making the "expanding the family" thing real! As was mentioned in one of our early posts, there have been many decisions that we have had to make without having any information on the age of our future children. One of those is beds. After much discussion and research, we have decided to go with bunk beds (that will not, of course, be bunked until much, much later). This gives us a lot of options. If we come home with two children, we will have the beds set up as two twin beds, both with side rails. If we come home with one, we will have the option of bunking the beds to save space and having our child sleep on the bottom bunk. In true Mark and Courtney fashion, yesterday we purchased 2 twin sheet sets (white, bleachable!)....then 2 twin mattresses....we have yet to have beds. :)
God has been very faithful in providing us with good prices on the things we need to get, and giving us wisdom in how we should go about getting prepared. There are a lot of things to think about. We will at some point need more sheets, but this is a start. We decided to wait to decide on comforters until fall, when they will be on sale for back-to-school (college). We may choose to go with blankets instead (we have LOTS of blankets--thanks Grandma Mary!!).

Ahh..to wait

Our SW now has all of our documents, and we are waiting for her to finish writing up our HS. It's supposed to take 1.5 to 2 weeks, so we're hoping for the end of this week or beginning of next week (next Monday is two weeks). I'm sure she is busy helping other people who also want to adopt, but sometimes it's hard to wait! :) It's easiest to think that God is simply helping us learn to be more patient gradually, since there will be a long wait between when we get our travel date and when we actually travel (probably 2-3 months). It will be so hard to be here and know that our kids are over there! We want so much to have them here with us, to hug them and hold them and play with them, to love them and watch them grow, and to teach them about God's amazing love. In the meantime, we pray for them, that God would keep them safe, and that He would give them someone to love them and hold them and play with them until we get there. God is faithful, and we know that He will watch over our children, since He loves them even more than we ever could. If you are currently praying for us and the adoption process, please pray also for our children. Conditions are often very rough in the orphanages, and the orphanage workers do the best they can with the resources they have. But there simply is not enough food or money to provide for all of the children. Thus they lack medicine, clothing, diapers, and enough caretakers to spend time with the children. While some orphanages are in better condition (physically and financially) than others, most are desperately short of resources (this seems to be true particularly in rural areas. Orphanages in the cities tend to be cleaner and have more resources than those in the country. They also have more volunteers who come in and spend time with the children.)
We cherish your prayers and trust that God will take care of all of us until we can come together as a family!

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.

The process...part IV (and Courtney's physical)

I promise once I get caught up to where we are I'll stop calling it "the process...part x". It's starting to sound like a bad movie series...

We had our home visit last week, and was that an experience. I'm not going to go into much detail on the blog, so if you are interested in more about what happened you can email one of us. It was a good time of discussion with our SW, and we were able to get her opinion on sleeping arrangements and adjustments after we return with a child or two. We also discussed daycare possibilities since we aren't sure yet how all of that will work when we get back. We would prefer to have me (Courtney) stay at home, so we will have to wait and see how things are at that point in time (since we don't know _when_ that point in time will be ;) ). We also discussed discipline--also a difficult topic since we don't know if we will be disciplining a 14mo old or a 3yo. Our discipline ideals will be the same, but a 3yo is going to be used to a different set of rules and discipline, so it will be different making that transition than it would be with a younger child (or so we currently think). At this point, I think we've filled you in on everything that has happened so far. From here on out, it really will be a little less exciting and we will probably be blogging less often (although I love to talk about our adoption process, so we'll see). :)

Regarding Courtney's physical:

Praises to God and thanks to all of you for your faithful prayers!!
I mentioned in our last post that our dossier documents need to be within 30 days old when we put it together, and this has caused some issues for me (Courtney). As I have started a new job, I have new insurance, and a new doctor. The earliest she was able to get me in is May (and much thanks to them--it was originally June and they found a spot to squeeze me in!!). The problem is I need a physical for our home study to be completed, and then I need the medical form filled out for our dossier. If I wait to get the HS physical until May, our INS approval will not be done until sometime in June, and I would need to go to the doctor again to get the Ukraine medical form filled out. So our social worker suggested I go to a local clinic and pay to have a physical done there (including a urinalysis and TB test). I would pay for it out-of-pocket, and then my insurance would cover the physical with my official doctor in May. Our HS would be done by the end of this month, etc. However, this has been an incredibly frustrating hassle. I have called any number of clinics and no one will do a physical for an adoption! They will do them for school, for work, for sports...not for an adoption. I don't know if there's a liability issue or what. Finally, Mark asked at his student clinic, and they couldn't do it but referred us to BarnesCare. I called BC and they said they could do a physical, the urinalysis would be included, so I would only pay for the physical and the TB test. We went yesterday at about 3:45 (with me telling Mark I wouldn't believe they would actually do the physical until after it was done) and when I checked in at the desk they said they stop doing physicals at 3:30pm!! *lol* (At this point, it's become a source of amusement that I can't get this physical done.) I told the nurse that I had called this morning and asked and they hadn't mentioned they stop doing them at 3:30pm, and she said "well, let's see if we can get you in!" I filled out paperwork faster than I ever have in my life, and they really got me in!! They were so sweet and helpful and I really appreciate it. They filled out all of the forms I needed, and I will return tomorrow to have my TB test read. All of this ended up costing only $68, which is such a blessing. Thanks again to all of you who have prayed that this would work out, and that if I was not able to get a physical that we would have peace about that. We know that there may be delays, and there is always a reason for those. Perhaps our child/ren will not be available for adoption for another few weeks and we need to be delayed in order to get there at the right time--who knows?!