Fingerprints and Fundraising

We have not posted anything in a while and I think a lot of that is because it feels like we are just king of waiting right now.  We submitted the necessary form to USCIS in November and it can take a couple months to get back - once we get that back, we will be ready to complete the final steps (certification and authentication of the remaining documents) in order to submit our dossier.  We did get our fingerprints done for USCIS last week, so it feels like there is a bit of progress in that area.

Our fundraiser of selling Meaningful Mixes (jars of soup and cookie mixes) is in full swing.  We sold many in church this past Sunday and we are getting a lot of orders from people in my office.  From an emotional perspective, it is challenging to fundraise because we know things can be difficult for others financially and we try not to really have any expectations and just be thankful for any and all support that we receive.  Once again, as with our previous fundraiser, we feel so incredibly blessed by all those who care about us and support us.  Through rolling out this fundraiser, we "announced" our adoption to my office (Jen's) and everyone has been so caring and supportive - I feel very honored to be working with such great people.

If anyone is interested in placing an order of mixes, feel free to respond with a comment to the blog and we will be happy to make some jars for you.  We are selling chicken noodle soup mix, beef chili soup mix, love soup mix (a soup with beans and noodles), chocolate chip cookie mix, snickerdoodle mix, peanut butter cookie mix, oatmeal M&M cookie mix, and s'mores bar mix (our personal favorite:-)).  Each jar is $7 and all of the proceeds go towards our adoption costs.  It is truly a labor of love because it is a lot of work, but they are fun to make and we love how they turn out and the results help us on our adoption journey!

Getting closer!

Our home study was finalized on October 15th!  Once we received that, we submitted our I-800A form to USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services).  Our understanding is that it can take 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 months to get approval.  We have to do our photo pages for our dossier, but other than that, we will be ready to take the final steps to submit our dossier once we get approval from USCIS.  There is plenty to do in the meantime, particularly work on fundraising and read the books required by America World for the adoption.  We hope to roll-out our new fundraising venture in mid-November - we will be selling jars of cookie mixes and soup mixes.  

I've been thinking lately about how the Lord has really been working in us, taking a couple who had never previously thought much about adoption and given us this desire to give a loving home to a child who might not otherwise have one.  We keep getting blessed with opportunities to talk to people who have adopted or are in the process of adoption and it means so much to hear their stories and imagine what is in store for us!

Making Progress

We are still waiting for our finalized home study - since our last post, Drew accepted a new job opportunity, which we truly feel the Lord led him to.  Because of the job change, we had to change a couple documents for our home study and because of a change in benefits, we are still working on those revisions.  We feel very close and just need to be patient and know it will be finalized soon.

The dossier paperwork is a work-in-progress.  Thanks to our family coordinator, we came to the realization that our dossier documents need to be certified (at the state level) and authenticated (at the Chinese consulate) within 6 months of the document being issued.  A couple of our documents had been issued at the end of March, so we had to make things happen pretty quickly.  Instead of mailing documents to the state, we drove out to Harrisburg a couple weeks ago and got 10 of our documents certified - the process went pretty smoothly.  Last week, we sent those documents (they are required to go through a courier service) to the Chinese Consulate in New York to get authenticated.  I (Jen) am a little nervous that the timing will work out, but it should and hopefully we will get those documents back this coming week.

We have officially been accepted into the Waiting Child Program for China through America World.  This means that technically, we can start receiving referrals.  However, in most cases, you need to have submitted your dossier to China and receive a "log-in date" in order to receive referrals.  There is one document in the dossier paperwork that needs the completed home study in order to process, and that document could take 1 1/2 to 2 months to process, so we are hoping to have our dossier paperwork finalized by the end of November or beginning of December.

Last Saturday (9/15), we attended the America World Adoption Pennsylvania 2012 Family Reunion picnic. It was a wonderful experience to see these beautiful families grown through adoption.  It was a great opportunity to meet people who are in the process of adopting and those who have already adopted.  We are really glad we went and are thankful for having had the opportunity.  Sometimes, it is easy to get bogged down in the paperwork and it was helpful to physically see examples of the beautiful end result!

Home Study Completed - in review process!

Where has the time gone?  The summer has gone by so quickly.  We completed our home study a couple of weeks ago.  One last piece of it was to consult with a doctor regarding the possible special needs of a waiting child.  We feel very fortunate that CHOP (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia) has an International Adoption Program - we consulted with a doctor in that program and she was very helpful in explaining the various special needs and their severity.  That was the last piece to submit to our social worker, who then finalized the home study report.  We have seen it, but it needs to go through several levels of review before it is finalized, so that is where things stand right now.

The next step is to work on our dossier paperwork.  A lot of it has already been completed because there is some duplication of documents between the home study and the dossier.  That helps make the dossier paperwork a little less overwhelming.  We also would like to start completing grant applications (in order to submit applications for grants, our home study needs to be finalized, but it would be good to have most of the work done so when the home study is finalized, we will be ready to go).

We also have realized we will need to continue our fundraising efforts.  That is an area where we would especially appreciate prayer.  The costs can get quite overwhelming at times, especially when you add the financial demands of everyday life.  I have struggled with the idea that so many people need to raise funds because of unforeseen circumstances (i.e. serious illness or injury, natural disaster, etc).  Even though we do not have control over the fact that it is extremely unlikely for us to have a biological child, we have chosen to adopt, and that perspective makes me struggle with the idea of fundraising.  At the same time, it seems virtually impossible to do all of this on our own.  We know no matter what, we are not on our own - we strongly believe the Lord is calling us to adopt from China and we know He will provide no matter what.  The challenge is to keep our focus on that when the costs we encounter get overwhelming.  We appreciate prayers that we will keep our focus on the Lord and allow Him to guide us in the financial aspects of adoption - it is not for us to control, but we need to have faith that He will work everything out.

Still working on our home study

We're sorry we have not posted anything in a while!  We have been working on trying to complete the remaining items for our home study.  Last weekend, we each completed the necessary online training.  We each had to complete 12 hours of training - there was a 10-hour required course and then we were able to choose the course that would fulfill the remaining required 2 hours.  It was very helpful to complete the training - it certainly makes sense why it is required.  Now we have to complete a consultation with a doctor to go over the potential special needs that we must consider in completing our Waiting Child application.  We are hoping to accomplish that this week so we can complete our home study.  We appreciate your prayers as we work through each step of this journey!

Home Study Visits Complete!

We have completed our home study visits!  We enjoyed meeting our caseworker and she has been great to work with.  Our first visit was Thursday 6/7 and consisted of about 2 hours of questions and a tour of our house.  Our second (and last) visit was Thursday 6/14 - our caseworker spent about 90 minutes with each of us.  We have some training to do and a few pieces of paperwork to complete for the home study - we are hoping to complete and submit the paperwork by the end of the month at the latest (hopefully sooner).

We want to continue to thank those who have contributed to our fundraising.  As the costs become clearer, we grow even more appreciative of the generous donations we have received.  The Lord has blessed us with family, friends, and church family who are wonderful, loving, and giving.  We are also so thankful for your continued prayers and support - it means a lot to us to know how much people care and that they want to walk with us through this journey!

Home study visits

We are a little late in posting this, but wanted to ask for your prayers because we have our home study visits with our case worker tomorrow (Thursday 6/7) and next Thursday (6/14) at 5:30pm.

One of those visits will include a tour of our home.  They say don't go hog wild cleaning your home unless that is how you normally keep it - it should be a good reflection of how we normally live.  We spent a good amount of time this past weekend cleaning and a lot of time tonight - we certainly want our house to be clean and organized and this has been a good reason to focus on those things (not that we don't normally, but we have been more detailed).  Unfortunately, our four cats can be somewhat difficult to control with their shedding and other presents they leave for us, so I vacuumed (which happens regularly) and Drew steam-cleaned (which does not happen regularly) tonight, so our carpet is looking very nice right now!

Anyway, we are looking forward to our home study visits but also aren't quite sure what to expect.  It is also a reminder to us that we still have more paperwork to complete and books to read and training to do, so we need to get more focused on working on those things.  Thank you for your prayers and we will post an update after our home study visit :-)

Update - 5/19/12

We're a little delayed in posting - we did submit the next round of paperwork a week ago and have heard from our caseworker that what we sent is complete.  We will be scheduling our home study visits for early to mid June.

We have sold about half of the puzzle pieces so far for our jigsaw puzzle fundraiser.  Honestly, we had a lot of momentum at first and we have kind of lost some of that momentum, but we know we will get there if it is the Lord's will.

Please continue to pray for us - there is still more paperwork to complete as we prepare for our home study.  We have been taking a "break" since completing the last round of paperwork, and we need to keep looking forward and making progress.  Also, one of our home study visits will include a tour of our house.  We don't need to go hog wild for that, but we view that as a good opportunity to take care of some cleaning that is long overdue:-)

Thank you for your support with our fundraiser!

We just want to say thank you, again, to those who have contributed to our jigsaw puzzle fundraiser so far - we are so grateful!

We live in a development where our mail is delivered into centralized "boxes", so we don't check our mail every day.  We checked our mail today and were greatly surprised to receive an envelope with no return address and inside it was a money order from an anonymous donor.  We are thinking that maybe the donor got our address from this blog and hopefully will see this thank you - we very much appreciate your donation!

Paperwork almost ready for home study!

Just to give a little background, after we initially submitted our application and the related paperwork and it was accepted by America World, we had to submit some paperwork in order to have an orientation meeting with the PA Director of Social Services for America World.  We had that orientation March 17th and since then have been working on the next round of paperwork.  This next set of paperwork needs to be completed before we can have our home study with our case worker.  The majority of this paperwork is items we take care of ourselves and there are two pieces we needed to receive in the mail - our marriage certificate and our birth certificates.  We had received our marriage certificate a couple weeks ago and just received our birth certificates, so the only thing we have left to do is finalize our autobiographies.  Our goal is to have this paperwork in the mail by Thursday (May 10th)!

Jigsaw Puzzle Fundraiser

To help offset some of our adoption costs, we are doing a jigsaw puzzle fundraiser.  We have set-up a separate page on this blog regarding our jigsaw puzzle fundraiser, so please visit that page (the link is in the menu to the right) for complete information about our fundraiser.  Here is a picture of the puzzle we are using:

We "unveiled" this fundraiser to our church family this morning and were overwhelmed by the generous response we received - so far, we have sponsors for a little over 200 puzzle pieces!  We are so humbled and honored by all of your support!

We are so blessed by our Riverside church family

Today, we had the opportunity to share with our church family about the journey we are on to adopt a little girl from China.  We had not shared our story with many people, and we were very nervous to tell our story to everyone, but it was such an incredible blessing to share with everyone what the Lord is doing in our lives.  So many times we keep things to ourselves, and I certainly understand it is difficult to share private matters with others, but as brothers and sisters in Christ, we are here to support and encourage each other, and we received so much support and encouragement today!  So many people are praying for us - we feel so cared for.  We cannot express the blessing of having people we know well and people we don't know well give us such encouragement.  Riverside has been a very important part of our lives and we are so incredibly thankful that Lord has blessed us with such a wonderful church family!

Welcome to our blog!

We are very excited to start this blog to document our adoption journey!  We are so blessed to have such wonderful family and friends and one purpose of this blog is that we can keep everyone posted on each of our steps in the adoption process.  I (Jen) am very new to the blogging process, but hopefully I will catch-on quickly:-)  Thank you for visiting our blog and we hope you will walk with us on our journey!