Welcome!

Hello everyone! We have decided to create a blog that will allow us to keep family and friends informed about our progress towards an adoption from Guatemala. We hope it will be helpful and informative to those of you who will follow along with us on this journey.

Here's a brief description of the process and what we've done so far. I will try and describe the process as best I can, please bear with me! (Veterans feel free to add anything I miss in the comments section!)

On January 6 we had our first homestudy visit with a social worker. This is required for anyone who wishes to adopt either domestically or internationally. We were a little nervous about this, wondering - what if the boys are bouncing off the walls,or what if she looks in my closets, sees the mess and says, "no way are you getting a child you can't even keep your closet clean!" I know these are irrational thoughts (except maybe the one about the boys) but you just want everything to be perfect so she thinks you're ok. We were extremely fortunate, our social worker was great and made us feel totally at ease. I don't know what I was so worried about! There was nothin' to it. After she had visited us two times at our house, she wrote a report about us and approved us to adopt a child. This was a big part of our paperwork and we were very happy to have it in our hands, completed. BTW, thanks to all you wonderful people who sent in references for us!!!

While we were working on the homestudy we were also able to put together our dossier. A dossier is a bunch of papers that basically describe who you are. Like an employment letter from Jamey's workplace, birth and marriage certificates, police clearances, etc. All these needed to be notarized then state sealed. A state seal confirms that the person notarizing the document is indeed a commissioned notary for our state. Sounds complicated, but it's not. And now we are at the one of last phases of our paperwork. We need to take the state sealed documents and have them authenticated by the Guatemalan consulate in Chicago. This is kind of nerve wracking because we have to send them there via Fed Ex and if they get lost we would need to start all those papers over again. Yikes!

One of the other final peices we are waiting for is our fingerprints. At the beginning of January we needed to file an application with Citizenship and Immigration (USCIS - form I-600A) to get permission to bring a foreign orphan into the country. As part of that they need our completed homestudy and fingerprints. They check the fingerprints with FBI to make sure were not in trouble with the law. Once those clear they will approve us to adopt a child and bring him/her into the country.

Once all of our paperwork is fully complete we wait for a referral. A referral is when you are matched with a child. It's one of those moments you think about while you're working your way through the mountain of paperwork to help keep you going!

OK, now that I've told you way more than you could ever want to know, I'll end this post. Thanks for reading this and feel free to leave comments at any time, we'd love to hear from any one of you!