Hurry Up and Wait

We're consistently being asked for an update on the adoption process, and any of you that have gone through this before know the drill.  You scramble to get a bunch of paperwork together, send it off, and wait.  You have some official appointment, and wait.  If nothing else, our journey so far has been teaching us the virtue of patience!

The biggest event that's happened in the past several weeks is that we were officially added to our agency's waiting list to be matched.  This means that, even though we're not formally approved yet, the agency is watching the list of children in need for our family! 

We traveled to Des Moines for our USCIS fingerprinting on October 7.  It was actually a very uneventful appointment.  We went in, got fingerprinted, filled out a "how did we do" comment card, and left.  We were hoping that they would have at least asked us a few grilling questions to make the trip seem worthwhile. :-)  Now that the appointment is done, we wait yet again.

The most common question we're asked is "how long until you bring your baby home?"  It could be anywhere from one to eight months (or longer, but hopefully not!) before we're matched with our child.  It's likely another five to eight months after that until we travel to China for the "gotcha day" to bring our little girl home.  In parallel, we were told to expect 30 to 90 days before the USCIS approval is granted.  Once we receive this approval, we will prepare our final round of dossier documents.  The dossier will then be completed by our agency and sent to China for approval.

Your prayers throughout this process would be awesome.  Specific items to pray for at this point in our journey:

• We've been on our agency's official waiting list for about six weeks.  Pray that God will bring clarity to the agency for the child He is preparing to join our family.
• Pray that USCIS approves our paperwork faster than we could imagine so we can finish all of the paperwork effort very soon.
• Pray for a timely approval of our dossier by China with no complications.
• Pray for our daughter's health, as we don't yet know what special needs she will have.
• Pray that she'll be as young as possible when we're matched.  This not only means less time in an orphanage, but also earlier access to medical care when we bring her home.

We're thankful for each of you walking alongside us in this journey and for your prayers.