Welcome Family and Friends!

We are just now putting this together as the only thing we have really had to report up to recently is the fact that we are still waiting. Now that we are getting much closer to referral time, we decided we better figure out how to do this. Ok-actually Steve has been teaching me how to do this. I may be a good teacher, but I am a pitiful student! We will be posting regularly on any new information and we hope you find it interesting. Also, we will add our favorite links and pictures.

We just recently had our homestudy update. That was quick and painless, thankfully. We are waiting on the paperwork from that so that we can submit more paperwork to U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS). Several months ago Dallas County started sending all adoption paperwork to the Oklahoma City USCIS. We are not sure how that will effect us--some say things are moving faster, others have had problems. Once our paperwork is submitted, we get a form to get fingerprinted (we can do this in Dallas). Then our fingerprints are submitted to Dept. of Homeland Security and we get the coveted I171H.

Besides paperwork, we are figuring and refiguring all possible referral date scenarios. Currently CCAA (Chinese Center of Adoption Affairs) has sent referrals to those who have submitted (LID's or Log In Date's) by October 13, 2005. Our LID is November 22, 2005. It sounds like we are really close-and we are-kind of. CCAA lately has only filled about 15 days of referrals every 30 days. It is almost time for another set of referrals, so we are predicting they send referrals through October some time in early March. That puts us in early May. We would travel approx. 6 weeks later. June? We will have to see how we do. As soon as we know anything new, we will post it. Until then, take care and best wishes!