Wednesday, June 27, 2007

The "Paper" Pregnancy

Our next step in the adoption process is our Home Study. This will be a written report based on interviews and home visits to assure all concerned that our family is able to provide all necessary means to give the child a good home. In addition, we will be collecting the following paperwork.
  • Autobiographies
  • Birth and marriage certificates
  • Police and FBI reports
  • Medical reports from dr.'s for whole family
  • Financial Records
  • Reference letters
  • Home visits with a case worker(family and individual interviews)
We will then apply to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and have fingerprinting done.

The last and final step is to complete our
Dossier. This includes getting originals of all documents above and a whole lot more paperwork. This will all be sent along with our HomeStudy to the Ethiopian government for review.
It can take 3-6 months to complete all the above processes.

After submitting our Dossier we will wait for a Referral, this wait can be 3-4 months.

Referral:
A referral is when your agency contacts you and says they have a child available for you. You will be given a picture and some information about your baby.

Travel:
Yes, we will travel to Ethiopia to bring home our baby. We would travel 1-2 months after getting our referral. We will spend about 7-10 days in Ethiopia visiting orphanages, experiencing the culture and loving on our new baby.

and then.....home we will come to start our journery as a family of 5.

They say this whole long process can take 8-12 months. It sounds so long but I will not complain, I will not be throwing up!!!!

I hope this answers some of your questions...thanks for reading !

7 comments:

Robby and Lynsey said...

Gosh, that sounds so complicated! Good luck getting everything organzied and ready!! It doesn't sound like there is anything we could help with ... I'm pretty sure we can't help with finger printing or medical histories ... but if there is anything else we can do, please let us know! :)

Robby and Lynsey said...

Happy Birthday, Cheryl! Hope you are having a fun day!

Jen said...

Oh, yah. Happy birthday yesterday and Stephanie tomorrow, right? The only birthday's I have ever been deliberate about remembering are my own family's and my boyfriend from highschool's and Chelan's (I have known her for almost twenty years now) and Aaron's 'cause it's Christmas not 'cause he's my favorite person!:)

Congatualions and good luck with all the collecting. That seems overwhelming...

When do you want to come visit me?

Tara said...

congrats!! i hope the process goes quickly and smoothly..so far God has been so good to us and our adoption process is moving along pretty quickly...so i will pray that you are blessed even more!
we just finished our homestudy a few weeks ago and are just waiting on my passport- then the dossier will be finished and we will just be "waiting"!!

Tara said...

hey! i just added a bunch of links to friends that are adopting from Ethiopia or people i have met through blogging- you should look, it is so fun to talk to and meet these other people that are going through the same stuff!

Amy B. said...

I just found your blog and will look forward to following your adoption journey. We are adopting a baby boy. Our site is www.ourjourneytoethiopia.blogspot.com
Blessings,
Amy

Raylinda said...

So excited for you!!! We're glad to hear to good news and will be praying for all of you during this process - If you don't know already we'll have baby price number 3 in January - and it's neat to be having kids so close in age again:) Let us know how it's all going and we'll make sure and keep up with your blog - love, Darrick, Raylinda, Caspian and Aemelia and ?