The past few weeks I’ve neglected the blog as life picked up pace and I needed to devote more time to home and life then to blog checking and updating! =) Blogging can be addictive!
So. . . much has happened here on the Taylor home front. We will be moving the second weekend in July! Originally we thought it best to stay in our apartment, renew our lease and move our adoption along. Then we got our renewal rates, and we’ll potentially have to renew one more time before the kiddos come to live with us depending on our wait times. So, we started praying about a move. We prayed very specifically for a townhouse no more then 2 miles from Joshua’s work so that we could sell one car and save some money. Well, we started looking in the area and found everything was $200 to $400 over our price range. But we felt we should keep waiting and looking. And. . .Praise the LORD, a 3 level, 3 bedroom, 2 1/2 bath townhouse, with a yard, in our price range, that is 1.5 miles from Josh’s work opened up! God is so kind to us. So, now begins the arduous task of packing everything up and moving across town. . . oh the joys! (We’ll gladly accept any help, hint hint!)
This move means that our adoption process is slightly delayed because our social worker can’t visit until we’re in the new house where we’ll be bring the kiddos. So our time frame now looks something more like:
In-home visits in July with the social worker. The social worker will write our homestudy report and we’ll submit it with our USCIS I-600A application. We then wait for a fingerprinting appointment (maybe August?) and then wait for the I-171form to be issued. The I-171 takes 8-12 weeks so we’re thinking probably October before this comes. Once we have that form we can submist our dossier to Ethiopia (hopefully within days of receiving the I-171). At the time of our dossier submission we will go on a waiting list with our agency to be matched with children.
Originally we had hoped to have our dossier submitted by July, but God knows what He’s up to and this waiting time has proved to be a productive and influencial time in our lives. We started out this adoption journey requesting 1 infant. Soon we decided that we’d like to be considered for 2 children under 3years old with atleast one under 12 months. But in the past few months of waiting God has continued to broaden our hearts. We will officially be asking for a referral of 2 children under 6 years old. This will bring some unique challenges as 2 children will arrive that do not speak any English and have a past and probably a family that they remember. We will have more detailed information on their past at the time of the referral, but we will keep that private for their protection. Many times older children are orphaned though due to poverty and disease. We are so excited at this prospect and ask for your prayers as we prepare for this major life change.
Concerning when the children will arrive. . .? Well, I spoke with our family coordinator and she said there isn’t a really specified time range for this request. She said that after we have submitted our dossier it could be anything from 3 months to 9 months. This is because children over 5 you usually only wait 3-7 months for, but children between 0 and 5 are about a 5-9 month wait. So it will depend if a young sibling group becomes available or if we’ll have to wait for 2 unrelated children to become available in our requested age range. So, with that said we could know who are children are anytime between January and September next year!!!! We’re hoping for the earlier part! =) And we’re very thankful that God already knows them by name, and that He is taking very good care of them.
1 Comment
June 10, 2008 at 4:08 am
Awesome and exciting!!