Beach weekend

This weekend we headed to the beach for the 4th. We went out Wednesday night with some friends and Stefan got to go surfing Wednesday night and Thursday. Thursday was beautiful and we took the kids to the beach for a long time.

Thursday night Stefan's sister and her family came down, and the rest of the family arrived on Friday morning. We celebrated two kid's birthdays and the 4th of July all in one, like every year. It was a lot of fun to be with everyone but the weather was pretty miserable on Friday and Saturday so the kids were stuck inside. That's not so bad for 2 year old girls, but 4 and 5 year old boys get a little stir-crazy. Of course, Sunday morning when we had to leave the sun came out! Oh well, we love Oregon for other reasons!

Aidan enjoys his crepes

Bridget's hair is long enough for a (tiny) ponytail! Very handy for the beach.

All 4 cousins in the morning (Aidan and Evan are sporting awesome pirate tattoos)

Omi reading to the girls . . . serious cuteness

I-171H

We received our approval from the Department of Immigration to adopt an orphan! This was really fast, it came only 2 weeks after we got our fingerprints, and sometimes this takes months! From here we have to make sure it gets to Ethiopia so that when we get a referral there are no hangups. That sounds simple, but apparently many people's are getting lost somewhere between the local Immigration office and the National Visa Center so I'll be spending some time on the phone soon making sure that everything is happening the way it's supposed to.

Dossier done!

I sent in our dossier today . . . finally! It seems like the last couple of things took forever to put together but it's finally done . . . all 33 pages of it, plus photocopies! Hopefully there won't be anything I have to redo and we'll be "officially waiting."

Fingerprinting

We got two things in the mail on Saturday - our notice that the Department of Immigration had received our I-600A and that our fingerprinting would be on Saturday the 14th. We also received the last documents for our dossier - our local police clearance letters - so as soon as I can get everything notarized and authenticated, I can turn in our dossier! Then we will be officially waiting!

I-600A!

We received our notarized home study in the mail yesterday, so I immediately added it to my I-600A form and copies of our birth certificates and marriage certificate and put them in the mail to USCIS. Hopefully we'll hear from them soon about our fingerprinting date, but for now I'm just working on the last few pieces of paper for our dossier so I can send that in to Holt.

New Pics

Here are some recent pics from when Sonja, Evan and Sage visited, a couple of weekends ago. We went out to Chinese food on Sunday where we all stuffed ourselves with Peking Duck and oysters as big as your head. . . seriously, they're amazing!

Update

I figured I should let everyone know where we are in this crazy adoption process. We have had our homestudy visits and gotten the rough draft emailed to us for corrections. I sent it back right away, last week, but have not received the final notarized copy yet. Once I get that I can send in our I600A which is what we file to the US Immigration department for approval to adopt. I can also turn in our dossier, minus the I600A approval. Once this is approved we can send our dossier to Ethiopia and be officially "waiting" for a referral. In reality we will get on the list as soon as we submit our dossier, even before the I600A approval comes but if we were to get a referral before that was done, we would have to wait until we had received it to move forward. Right now they are saying that from dossier to referral is 3-6 months so I'm hoping we'll have a referral by fall.