One Step Closer

Sweet sweet entrance to the next step...

Today we picked up three notarized copies of our home study from CHI and sent in the I-600A application to USCIS. We’ve been told that it will take anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks for USCIS to send us the approval form, I-171H, which will then complete our dossier. The optimist in me says we’ll receive the I-171H in mid-November, state certify everything before Thanksgiving, and mail everything to CHI by December 1st. Based on this timeline our dossier could realistically be in Ethiopia by Christmas and a referral could be received as early as February! That’s the optimist. The slightly slower and somewhat more realistic (have patience) timeline has the I-171H to us mid-December which pushes everything back about a month meaning March would be the earliest realistic time to receive our referral. We prefer to be optimists.

In addition to officially entering the next stage in our journey, today we learned a very important lesson: Grandmothers are very excited when a new grandchild is on the way so any and all email updates must be VERY carefully worded… The moment we put our USCIS application in the mail we sent our mothers an email heavy with international adoption lingo to share the great news. I wrote that we could realistically have our state certified dossier to CHI by early December so that it could travel to Ethiopia by Christmas. This in itself is a very exciting and seemingly harmless update, however if you interpret “it could travel to Ethiopia by Christmas” as “we could travel to Ethiopia by Christmas” you can imagine the confusion that would ensue. Within moments I received two emails, one voicemail, and a text message (from my younger sister who didn’t even receive the original email but who my mom knows could text me and receive an instant response) inquiring if we were actually going to be picking up our child by this Christmas. We may have caused several minor heart attacks prior to clarifying that we were referring to the dossier traveling to Ethiopia in December, not us, (although how fantastic would that be!) but it was kind of fun to hear, read, and see the excitement created by a mere inference that we would be picking up Baby Bean by Christmas. Now that would be a Christmas gift!

The funny thing is that although our lovely mothers misunderstood the specifics of the timeline, in reality it could be just a month or two later. Traveling by Christmas would be a miracle, but traveling by Valentines Day is definitely within the realm of possibility. We were going to wait until our paper pregnancy was in the official “waiting for a referral” stage before beginning to plan the baby’s room but now that we’re just 4-8 weeks out of that stage we’re starting to reconsider. Might be kind of fun to go baby shopping this week.

Oh, and the Vikings beat Chicago yesterday so perhaps the first item on the shopping list should be something purple.