News From Nepal

It is encouraging that we have received some news about adoptions in Nepal. Since we have started this process, there have been very little children that were actually being adopted out of Nepal. Apparently there has been some political problems in the country and because of this adoptions have not been a top priority for the government. But last week, our agency called to tell us that they finally had some news from Nepal. They said that Nepal is going to try to get all of the 2009 adoptions processed by April. This is very excited news for those people who submitted their dossiers last year. Some have been waiting for a year to receive their referrals. Maybe now they can have hope that they will be able to get their children home very soon. She also told us that Nepal will be accepting dossiers between April 15 and July 15 for those of us who have been accepted into the 2010 program.

So what does this mean for us? Well now we have a deadline for submitting our dossier. But we have no control over how quickly we can get this done. Right now we are waiting for our fingerprints to come back (a process that we have been told can take up to 4 months) before our homestudy can be completed. There has already been a delay in this because DHR changed the method that they used with the fingerprints. Our fingerprints were sent back to us and we had to do a few additional steps to submit our fingerprints. But we have done what they have required and resent our fingerprints. I am hopeful that the reason they changed the process is so that it can be done a little quicker. Once our fingerprints come back, our homestudy will be submitted to DHR where it will be for 4-6 weeks. From there it will go to the Atlanta CIS office where it will be for 6-8 weeks. And then we will begin work on our dossier and once it is completed it will be submitted to Nepal.

All of this is completely out of our hands. We have done everything that we can do up to this point. We sent our final paperwork to Lifeline today. So, hopefully, when our fingerprints come back it will not take long to complete our homestudy and get it sent to DHR. I am praying that all of this will happen and we will get our dossier to Nepal by July. I know that only God can make it work out. I have to put my complete trust and hope in Him that it will be done in His perfect timing.

Fundraisers and Homestudies

We have officially begun fundraising for our adoption. Our first fundraiser is through Just Love Coffee. We have our own store where you can go and purchase coffee. We get $5 for every bag that is sold. It would be a great way to help us adopt our little girl and we would really appreciate any help that we can get.

I am very excited that we have made a lot of progress with our adoption in the past few weeks. We had our first homestudy meeting on January 19. Our second meeting was on January 26, where we each went in for individual interviews. And then our last meeting was on February 4. This was the one where our social worker came to our house and met the boys. So now we are done with all of our homestudy meetings. They all went very well (at least we felt like they went well). I was a little surprised at how easy all of the interviews were, I guess I expected it to be a little more intense. But I am so glad that we are done with that part of our homestudy.

There is still a lot to do before the homestudy is complete though. We are waiting for our fingerprints to come back . Apparently that can take a few months. We still have a lot of training to do. We are deligently working on that and trying not to get overwhelmed by the amount of information that we have to learn. And we also have to get our physicals done. So it will still be a while before our homestudy is complete, but we have made a lot of progress.

Everything that we do feels like we are getting a step closer to bringing our daughter home and that is something that can not happen fast enough. We know that this will all happen in God's perfect timing, but we will do whatever we can to help the process along.