Great News!

I emailed the USCIS office yesterday and very promptly received a very polite response that our I-600A was approved last week!! Yay! My guess is that either it got lost in the mail or they mailed it to the old address. I am to contact them again if I don't receive it by the end of the week and they will mail another one. So by the end of next week our home study should be able to go to Korea. Woohoo!

This should not be taking this long

You are sick of listening to me whine about the lack of I-600A approval, and I am sick of waiting and wondering what went wrong this time. I have semi-official confirmation that this is taking way too long, and it looks like our agency is going to contact USCIS soon to ask about the status of our application *gasp*. Contacting USCIS is a huge deal, since they are usually not to be bothered, and since contacting them makes them like you even less and can even have an adverse effect on the speed your paperwork is being processed at. In this state, we all live in fear of the USCIS lady! By now I am scared that they are going to deny us, which is actually pretty unheard of, but with all the mishaps we've already had, who knows.

I am honestly feeling like I am making this whole adoption thing up. I will soon be travelling to Germany and had planned to do some shopping for the baby, as some of the things available in Germany are hard to come by here, but I really don't think I can get myself to buy anything for this elusive baby. I mean, we're not even offically waiting on a referral!

Since we moved in our home, which was previoulsy inhabited by a family with 3 children, we've been on the receiving end of tons upon tons of catalogs and magazines pertaining to babies, children, and all things purchasable for them. I browse through them, but don't even feel like this stuff will ever be applicable to me.

You've got mail - it's just not what you hope it is

When I saw that we had mail from USCIS today, I got very excited. But when I saw that it was on white paper, my excitement quickly dwindled.

On a positive note, we know that someone has touched our file. On a not so positive one, there has been a royal screw up regarding some documents and our home study, and we're going to be back to paperchasing again. So after almost 7 months of this, we're back at the beginning.

Please excuse me while I have a screaming fit and my first official nervous breakdown of this adoption.

Note to Self

Thinking about the lady at the local USCIS office every single waking moment does not make her process our I-600A any faster. Must find new things to obsess about.

The first purchase for baby

We weren't going to buy anything for the baby until the referral, but there is one thing we thought was really important and we felt it would be best to go ahead and make the purchase already. So we bought a house!

We really wanted to give our child a permanent home that he or she can grow up in, so we started looking for homes several months ago. Let's just say we didn't have the best of luck, but we finally closed on a home last week. We will be moving at the end of July! I have to admit that it is a major step for me to move to the suburbs, but the need to provide a stable home in a safe area outweighs my irrational fear of the 'burbs. It can't be that bad, right?

I have never understood why people always seemed to buy houses when they were about to have a baby, but here we are, doing the same thing. We're really looking forward to finally settling down and having a home.

Of course this means that we will get to see our social worker again to do a home study update, which in turn will have to be forwarded to USCIS. I am hoping this will be smoother than I fear!

Hmmmm

So when I thought I would be able to relax while waiting for the I-600A approval, I was wrong! It's almost been four weeks since we were fingerprinted, and obviously we haven't heard anything from USCIS. We don't know if our fingerprints were approved, and if so, when. I hate not knowing! For all I know, they could've lost our paperwork. It's been a little over 6 months since we officially started this process, and somehow I don't feel like we've made any progress (even though in my head I know we have).

I just found out that two of my friends are pregnant, and I am so happy for them! I don't envy them for having to get big (and bigger), having morning sickness, having to give birth (that can't feel good), and having to deal with a newborn, but I very much envy the fact that they have a due date! How cool would it be to know the approximate date, plus/minus two weeks, on which you'll become a parent!