Yes, some movement indeed!

Write this day down: August 31, 2009. It happens to be our 5 year anniversary of living in this house, but more importantly, it's the day that my first ever adoption hope was proved true-- a family has received travel approval to get their little girl from Nepal! I believe they were one of 3 Gladney families who received their referrals a few months ago, so this should mean that 3 orphans are soon to be united with their forever families. Surely the angels are rejoicing with them!

maybe some movement?

It looks like the families who received referrals a few months ago may finally be getting travel approvals from Nepal within the next week. I hate to get my hopes up since the last bit of information that I thought was good turned out to be nothing... but this could be a sign that things are finally moving again.

The other thing that could be good for us is that 90% of Americans with dossiers in Nepal have requested an infant, so we should technically be moved to the top 10% of the list since we requested a 1-3 year old. The majority of dossiers for other countries are also for infants, I think 60%. You would think there would be a great deal more 1-3 year olds in the orphanages since there haven't been any adoptions within the past few years, and Nepal has said in the past that it is their priority to refer older children first, so this may mean we won't have to wait for years. But if I had a dollar for everything that seemed logical in the adoption world that turned out to be completely false, I could not only pay for our adoption, but everyone else's too! (wouldn't that be cool?)

We have a fingerprint appointment!

I'm not going to bother looking at how long this took-- I feel like it was quick so I'm going to enjoy that feeling for tonight. Our local immigration office has changed the way they do things, so we have an actual appointment date the day after Kyle gets back to town next week (so glad that worked out). I'm thinking last time we had our approval about 3 weeks later, so I'm hoping they're still on track with that timing.

Although that means we won't make the August date for sending in our dossier that I foolishly set as a goal, I will still be happy with early September. The only variable that could potentially set us back further is the state criminal background check. A blog friend just got hers so I have an email into her to ask how long it took... I'm afraid I won't like the answer (there I go with the worry again-- stop it!), so pray she says 3 weeks or less. ***Update: she said less than 30 days. I'll take it!

In other news, I got an email response from our agency about what's going in Nepal, and she basically said that this is not new (the political turmoil) and they aren't worried. I'm hoping it's not their version of the "it will happen in the Lord's timing" answer we always got from our last agency. Not that that's not true-- of course this adoption will go according the Lord's perfect timing, and of course I get tremendous comfort and peace from that truth. However, it gets pretty frustrating when you're looking for something other than an obvious-though-valuable Biblical principle from your adoption agency.

things may start moving in Nepal

According to news reports from Nepal, a minister has now been appointed to head the state agency that handles adoptions. Some people had been told that adoptions would not move forward until that person was in place. Let's hope that the converse is also true, and let's also pray for the new minister, Binda Hada.

Let's also pray that we are able to buy health insurance for our little guy. If the health care bill passes, one of the many ill effects is that the type of insurance we have (high deductible HSA) will no longer be available. Supposedly we would be able to keep it if we already have it (I'm not even counting on that), but no new policies could be written. We pay less than $50 per month for Lily's high deductible policy, and we paid over $400 per month for full coverage for her (only did that one month through COBRA). Obviously that would be a big deal for our family, and many others like us who have individual plans.

Please do your part and sign the petition saying no to more government involvement in our health care-- we can't afford it!

Ready to start again

I've been on a major paperwork hiatus since we've been back from California, but I'm ready to dive in again. I did two whole things in the past 24 hours-- found out where to get fingerprinted for our state criminal background checks and confirmed whether the notary language on one of our documents was going to work. The answers were good, so off we go into a week of paperwork. If we can get our fingerprints done and the application mailed off to Austin, then I think that's the last major piece of info that needs to be sent for. The rest are things I can do in my pj's-- financial docs (copying what we already did for our homestudy) and our application letter and some other easy paperwork-- while we wait for the I-171 from USCIS, or Immigration. I know they cashed our check a couple weeks ago, so hopefully we'll get our request to get fingerprinted in the next couple of weeks and our approval by the end of August. That may be optimistic, but I try to be optimistic about one thing at least once a day.

I also asked our agency rep what she thought about the slowdown and whether we were safe sending a huge chunk of money to a country that was apparently eating the money rather than using it for anything adoption-related. As I was writing the email I was struck by the fact that I never would have asked our China agency something so ridiculous. The canned response would have made me choke on my breakfast, so I never bothered to ask much of anything ("While international adoption is very unpredictable, we know that the Lord is in control and we will be sure to pass along any information that we get. The families that just got referrals waited XYZ months.") They didn't happen to tell you that if you took the square root of XYZ and multiplied it by pi then by your birth year, that would be your approximate wait time, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the wait time of the people who just got referrals (people whom God was not trying to teach patience to, apparently, because of their blink-of-an-eye wait time). Anyway, it will be interesting to see how Nepal Agency's response differs. I'll keep you posted.