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.