Adoption Update

We are celebrating tonight! We mailed our completed Dossier to our adoption agency in Port Angeles, Washington. My hands were trembling a little as I put six months of paperwork into the priority envelope. : ) I don't know if I was nervous or just excited. Either way, it is a huge step forward and a big mile marker in the journey.

We also mailed our homestudy with an I-600A form (Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition) to our U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in El Paso. These papers will be processed so that we have permission to bring a child back into the United States. We will wait for an appointment to be fingerprinted at the USCIS office and then everything will be out of our hands.

All of our paperwork has to make it through several stages including: authentication, translation into Amharic, a few stops in Washington DC, and then on to Ethiopia. Once our paper packet arrives in Ethiopia, we will officially be on the waiting list for a little girl.

We expect the paper passing could take two to three months before it arrives in Ethiopia. Then we would expect to wait from seven months to a year for a referral.

Maybe we will have an awesome Christmas present next year!!


(A Dossier is all of the necessary paperwork to apply for an adoption including: birth certificates, marriage certificate, bank statements, medical records, police clearance, tax forms, reference letters, a huge document about us called a homestudy and pictures of us. We also wrote letters to the government of Ethiopia and gave our agency permission to go to adoption court proceedings in Ethiopia on our behalf.)