Home Study Complete!

On Friday we picked up our completed home study! This is the biggest chunk of paperwork that is included in the dossier that will be sent to Colombia. After we picked up our home study we went to KCMO to visit the Homeland Security Office to file our I-600A - otherwise known as the "Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition". This is the form that the US government will use to determine if we are fit to be parents in their eyes. We were surprised how quick the process went when we go there - we handed an immigration officer our home study, birth certificates, marriage certificate, and our completed I-600A. We paid our fees, got our fingerprints done, and we were on our way! We should get I-171H back in 90 days or less and this will be the final document we need to include in our dossier. Everyone cross their fingers that it will get back to us sooner than that! While we are waiting for the I-171H we have some additional paperwork we need to finish along with some photo layouts for both the Colombian government and our new baby and his or her foster family.

The Shopping Begins!

Well, I can't believe I made it this long without making a purchase for our poco bambino (little child). We were at Target yesterday perusing the Dollar Spot section (gotta love the Dollar Spot!) and we found some very cute cardboard books that teach children shapes, animals, and colors. We bought all three of them and we thought they would be great books to take down with us when we pick up our child in Colombia. There's a picture of an animal, such as a turkey, with caption of "Turkey". I had the great idea of writing the Spanish word equivalent below the English word. (Turkey is Turquía in Spanish in case you are interested!) It's very important to us to incorporate Colombian culture into our child's life and we both working on our Spanish so we can raise our child to be bilingual. Vive Colombia!

Home Study Visit

We had our home study visit on Friday and it went great! We spent the few days before furiously cleaning and doing some home repairs that needed to be done. We are still waiting on Tim's employment letter and with that our home study will be complete! When we get our home study complete we can begin the INS process which is needed to complete our dossier.