Adoption paperwork update

In January at E's last post placement visit we began talking with our case worker about a third child.  At the end of February I saw her again when she came to present at our Love Justice OVC event and again I told her we were still waiting to get started until we knew more about a special little ones file.  Fast forward less than one week and CC@A announced a change to the Waiting Child program.  I had heard rumors of it earlier in the week and emailed our China Coordinator at BAAS to see what she knew.  Although the official announcement wasn't made for another day or two she let me know if was coming and that we should get started on our dossier.  With the new rules we now have to have an LID (log in date) meaning our dossier has to be in China before we could petition to adopt a child on the shared list if their file had been on the list for less than 30 days.

Things this month went by fairly fast for us with all the paperwork that needed to be done.  We submitted our local application to A New Beginning on March 5th, mailed our application to BAAS on March 8th, met with our caseworker on March 9th, state fingerprinting done on March 12th, fingerprinting approved on March 17th, met again with our caseworker again on March 19th after our doctor appointments for our medical exam.  Now I am pleased to say that the month of March is over, all of our paperwork is in our hands except for our homestudy that is currently in review with BAAS.  This is a record for us as far as the paperchase goes.  For M's dossier we couldn't send it in until July 2005 and we began the process in January 2005.  For E's dossier we began our parent training in October 2007 but didn't get our dossier complete submitted to CC@A until August 2008.  With a lot of prayer we might be able to get our dossier submitted for this one by the end of May. 
Hopefully, we will have our approved and completed homestudy by the end of next week and then off to USCIS it goes with our I800A application.  I would have loved to have our application sent off by today but even if we are another week out all will be well.  We have already started sending our other documents off to be certified and authenticated.  We have one document that goes out of State so it was sent off on Monday and the rest are ready and waiting to will be done once we have the homestudy to go with it.  Can't wait until we can give a completed packet to our agency to get sent to China.  Keep us in your prayers for speedy I800A approval.

Thank you caseworker C for all your hard work and going with the flow as we sprung our change of plans on you. We so appreciate her and know none of this would have been possible this month without her. She rocks! Thanks goes also to our wonderful family and friends, we appreciate your willingness to get our referrence letters to ANB right away, we couldn't have done it without you. Our greatest thanks goes to our Father for telling us to step out and get it done. It would be so easy to sit back and say we were waiting for the Lord to bring us our next child when what he is telling us to do is get to work. There is so much that we have to be faithful to him for but at some point we have to take action in order for Him to work His miracles. Thank you Lord for laying this on our hearts that this is your desire and plan for our family.