We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. ~Isaiah 64:8



Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Adoption Update - Aug. 6th - Transfiguration

Today is the day of The Transfiguration of Our Lord. Funny, our adoption process seems to have just transfigured, too. Instead of being in the "early" stage of the "MAY we adopt?", with the submission of the i800 we'll move on to the stage of "CAN we adopt?".

If the adoption journey can be compared to a biological pregnancy, the "MAY we adopt?" phase (which includes our personal decision to adopt and then the state's determining us to be adequate parents, ie. the Homestudy) is kind of like the "deciding to get pregnant" phase of a biological pregnancy, while the "CAN we adopt?" phase is a bit like the "trying to get pregnant" phase. I always liked the "trying" phase! :)

It's good to be actively doing something, although there is another wait, this wait has an expected end of about 4 months. (That is the turn-around time for our local USCIS office to process the i800s.) It could be shorter and it could be longer, but not by much. This is one advantage over the biological process, at least at this point, we know approximately how long we'll be waiting. And during that wait we have quite a bit of work to do: education requirements to fulfull, documents to collect and have apostilled, etc.

When that wait is over (when our i800 is processed and we get the "OK" from the US government to bring an orphan into the USA), we'll submit our dossier to the Armenian government and we'll be officially "PAPER PREGNANT". That is when the biological process has a leg up, so to speak. We won't really know how long the wait will be from that point until it is over, unlike biological pregnancy which has a pretty closely determined wait time (all things being fairly normal).

So, the update for this week is that we are done filling out the i800 and it is being carefully reviewed by our agency. We hope to have it in the mail to the local USCIS office by the end of the week...then it is 120 days of waiting. Pray for patience! And have a Blessed Day of Transfiguration.

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