Homestudy Completed!!

This is a happy, happy moment! The long road to completing our home study is finished. We should get the hard copy soon. It's already been edited and reviewed by our international adoption agency, Gladney. It has been more than I expected. How so?... I didn't realize how much of the paperwork process would be out of your control. There is a lot of hurry up and wait- but going into it I didn't know that the hurry up would lead to the wait. I kept thinking the hurry up was leading to being done... and now it is!! Yippee!


So what is next? Once we get our hard copy we will send it in along with our I-600A form to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, CIS for short. I think the purpose is that they will determine if we qualify to adopt a child. It seems like the home study approves us as prospective adoptive parents in our state, the I-600A approves us for US adoption and the dossier for Rwanda is like the application asking the Rwanda government if we can adopt from their country. I'm sure it's more complex than that but that's my interpretation of it all (at this point). CIS will notify us once they get our paperwork and then we are required to do more fingerprinting as part of the application. Once we get our CIS approval we will then complete our dossier and mail it off to Rwanda. Then Rwanda will (hopefully) send us our approval letter to adopt from their country. They will then start the process of matching us with a child, a boy between 9 months and 4 years old. After a 3-9 month wait we will be notified of a referral- which is basically a match!

The other weekend as we were waiting for the final review of our home study I made a new baby quilt for our son-to-be in Rwanda. I made it hoping it will be a special blanket he will carry everywhere- kind of like Linus's security blanket. I plan to bring it to Rwanda when we go. My son, Gaven, never attached to a blanket or stuffed animal so who knows if our other son will or not. Nevertheless I wanted to have a special quilt ready for him. My husband says our son Gaven never had the need for a security blanket because he had me around all the time... guess I was the security blanket :) I'm honored to be able to be that again for another precious little boy.