Lilypie Waiting to Adopt tickers

Lilypie Waiting to Adopt tickers
Lilypie Waiting to Adopt tickers

Thursday, March 1, 2012

APPROVED!!!

Well lets get the bad news out of the way...Today is March 1st, my original goal for having our dossier in bulgaria. Well obviously it's not there. Ok that's over!

NOW THE GOOD NEWS! Only two weeks after we sent off our USCIS application. We got our letter in the mail today that it has been sent on to the next step which means they are not requiring any more information and our Homestudy looks good! This is great considering we were told by our Placing agency they really weren't sure if they would accept our homestudy. They almost expected it to get rejected. Well we had a lot of prayer, and not only did God get it through smoothely, He did it in record speed! We will be waiting about 2 weeks for our fingerprinting (biometrics) date, then we will get our official approval letter. After that, our Dossier is COMPLETE! About time. Maybe we can have it in Bulgaria by April 1st instead...that would be no joke!!!We ask everyone to just continue to pray!

We also had our first major fundraiser this past weekend with dinner and a movie and silent auction. Thanks to incredible family and friends, we raised $2,000 dollars and had some incredible fellowship! We are preparing for a puzzle fundraiser next. If anyone knows of some great adoption themed puzzle sites through it out there!!

6 comments:

  1. If I remember right, you will get your biometrics date and then another letter if there are things that need to be added to your homestudy. The first letter is usually just to let you know that they have your information and it is going from the lockbox to the Hague department.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree with Katherine. The first letter you receive is merely a notice of receipt that your application reached the Texas lockbox and was opened because they handle the checks. Now it is sent on to the NBC Hague unit in Missouri where you will be assigned an agent. He/she will be the first person to actually read your home study and review your documentation. If anything is missing, you will get an RFE (Request for Evidence) letter which is also known as a pink slip in the adoption community because it's printed on pink paper. Fingers crossed you won't receive one of them. I would expect this process to take at least another month, including fingerprinting, from USCIS's end.

    Viviane
    www.martiniadoptionroad.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  3. Actually after speaking with our Placing agency they informed me that after receiving this letter it was very unlikely they would ask for anything. So yeah fingers crossed. But the letter itself said to expect a letter with biometrics date within the next two weeks. I appreciate the reality check, but I'd prefer to remain excited about our letter instead of having my bubble burst, lol! Every little step is huge for us and we're going to continue to treat it that way!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Lindsey,

    It is super important to stay positive and celebrate the little steps forward, but I do wish that when we started out three years ago on our Bulgarian adoption journey someone not agency related would have given me some honest and upfront insight. If they had, we might never have chosen Bulgaria as our sending country.

    RFEs are not uncommon. I don't know why your placing agency would say that passing through the lockbox would almost certainly prevent you from receiving an RFE. That's simply not true in my experience and that of many other parents. We got on RFE from our NBC agent because she wanted a sentence moved to a different place in the homestudy. I kid you not, she didn't like the placement of one sentence and it cost us weeks.

    Anyway, I hope for sure that you don't have to deal with any RFEs. Once you have been fingerprinted, it takes about 4-7 days to get your I-800A approval in the mail.

    Good luck and I will keep following your journey.

    Viviane

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh Goodness, I certainly hope our NBC agent isn't so picky. So why would you have changed countries? anything specific we should know up front? You said it's been three years, have you completed your adoption yet? Thanks for giving us the info, we do appreciate it though!

      Delete
  5. We started out in 02/09 hoping to adopt two children from BLG, sibs or unrelated, up to age 3 with minor or correctable needs. Then as our referral wait went on, I started to do more research, connect with more families in process and so on and realized that fully healthy toddlers are rarely referred from BLG. There are never infant referrals for IA. I realized that we would be waiting for years for two kids, so I started looking elsewhere. We ended up finding our son in Armenia (he came home 07/11) and then we changed our parameters in BLG to include many more SN which helped us get a referral of a 17 mo old girl with SN after 16 months of being registered. She came home 11/11. We were very fortunate. Other families have waited so much longer.

    Bulgaria is a great country to adopt from because it's more affordable than many other EE countries and travel is easy and short. It's a wonderful program for the adoption of children with SN and older children. They also have a speedy process for the adoption of waiting children. However, it's not a great country if you want a healthy (or nearly healthy) toddler because your wait will be at least two years, more realistically three years, from registration. I know lots of families who are in the upward of 24 months wait stage now. By my count, there are still about 200 families in line whose dossiers were registered before 12/31/09. Just at the end of January 2012 a Greek family was referred a healthy 17 mo old girl after a 5.5 year referral wait. I can't imagine waiting that long in any country. Another family waited 38 months for a healthy child who came home just before his third birthday. There's a family I know with parameters very similar to our initial ones who was registered about a week after us in 11/09 and they continue to wait for their two kiddos. I know we would also still be waiting if we had stayed the course with our initial referral request.

    I have published on my blog for almost a year and a half now the referrals that MOJ makes every month. This information is publicly accessible on their website. The youngest child I have ever seen referred through the main procedure (meaning not an official waiting child) was just this month, a 16 mo old boy with missing limbs. Then there have been a handful of 17-20 mo olds, almost all with some SN. You can check through the old entries on my blog and see for yourself: www.martiniadoptionroad.blogspot.com.

    I don't know what your child parameters are, so maybe none of this will apply to you. You might have a referral within a few months of registration. But if I were ever to try to adopt a healthy child or one with minor SN under age three again, I would most likely not do it in Bulgaria.

    If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at viviane8 @ yahoo.com. I know that the child meant for you will find you, but there are some choices you can make along the way to steer/speed the process.

    Viviane

    ReplyDelete