Happy Thanksgiving

We really have something to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.......We got our approval to adopt from the USCIS in the mail today!!!!! Our agency must have gotten the form from the USCIS as well because they sent us an email this afternoon congratulating us on getting approved as well as some instructions regarding what happens next. Our agency is now taking our "Dossier" of documents and having them certified and authenticated. They tell us this should take three to four weeks. With a little luck we should have our dossier sent to China by Christmas. Our agency has also suggested that we get immunized for Hepatitis A and B. This is a series of shots that take quite a few months to complete so they suggest we start now. These immunizations are not mandatory but we are probably going to do them anyway. The only other thing left for us to do is pay our agency and China Center for Adoption Affairs fees. Adoption isn't cheap but we feel it is such a small price to pay for the joy we will get when we bring our daughter home.

Family Car

We've decided to jump into this "we're going to be parents soon" thing head first and bought ourselves a station wagon. But this isn't your daddy's station wagon with the wood-grain side panels. We got a Volvo V50 Sport wagon.

We haven't felt real comfortable with our Saturn (which we traded in) and didn't like the idea of driving our child around in car that is made of plastic. We got one of the left-over 2005 models so we got a really good deal on it. Not much new news related directly to the adoption. We are still waiting for our I171 form from the USCIS. These forms seem to take anywhere from 2 to 8 weeks to process. We are at the 2 week point today so we are hoping to get the form by the end of the month. Our adoption agency posted a message on their website last week that the wait time for referrals has increased from 6-7 months to 7-8 months. They didn't give a reason for the increase just that they expect longer wait times into 2006. It is a little frustrating to hear this but in the big scheme of things a couple extra months isn't really that big of a deal.

Assembly Required

We got the replacement parts for the crib in the mail yesterday and finished assembling it today. The new replacement parts package came with a new set of instructions which was slightly different than the original instructions as well as having some spare hardware that went unused. We did finally figure it out though but it took far longer than the 45 minutes that the instructions said it would take. We needed to arrange the furniture a little differently than we planned because the room is on the small side and the furniture is a little bigger than we expected but we are very happy with the way it looks.

Baby Furniture

Busy day today, the baby furniture was delivered this morning and we are very happy with it. We started to put the crib together but found that the assembly instructions are wrong and/or we are missing some parts. We called Jordan's Furniture and they are sending us out some replacement parts so we should be up and running next week. This afternoon we went into Boston to get our fingerprints done at the USCIS. It was a pretty cool process. It is all computerized and as they take your prints they come up on a screen and then are transmitted immediately to the FBI. In about 4-6 weeks we should get our approval form from them. Once we get this form back everything goes back out to our adoption agency and they have our forms authenticated and translated and then send them off to China. So if everything goes according to schedule we should be traveling to China late summer early fall 2006.

Fingerprinting

We are pretty impressed with the USCIS. We got a letter in the mail today to come in for our fingerprints!! We thought it would be an appointment for a specific date and time but it says we can come in anytime within a two week period. We are planning to go in this Saturday depending on what time the baby furniture gets delivered. This is good news as we didn't expect to get in for our fingerprinting for at least a couple weeks