Fingerprint appointment

Hoping our fingerprint appointment from the USCIS would come this week, we ran to the mailbox each day. Well....it came on Saturday! We are not only excited to check this task off, we are so thankful because it fell between two very important meetings for Vito. He will fly home on the 26th from Florida, we will go to the appointment on the 27th and he will head to Asheville right after for a couple of days. We also had 29 documents notarized over the weekend....thank you Nancy! After our agency checks over all of the documents we will send them to be apostilled.

Every Christmas we exchange ornaments. This year we exchanged Polish eggs we found at the Polish festival! Thought we would share!

Happy Holidays

HApPy hOLiDaYS

Scooter, our beloved dog starred in this years Christmas card. We wanted to share the pictures of him. Hope you all have a wonderful holiday and may 2010 be a fabulous year!

Homestudy Complete+I-800A sent in=a great day!

Today a couple of milestones have been reached. Last week we received word from our social worker that our homestudy was complete! We couldn't be happier. Vito was able to pick up the completed homestudy from our agency on Friday along with the I-800A instructions. Over the weekend we filled it out... proofed it, and then proofed it again. Today we dropped it off at the local Fedex dropbox with our certified check. In case you are wondering the I-800A starts the process to bring a child into the United States from another country. It generally takes 3 months to complete, if all goes well. At some point they will contact us to come into their office for biometric tests. So for now we are going to just enjoy the holidays!

The bright side after a few steps back

Last week we had a few glitches. Vito's Pennsylvania child abuse clearance form came back because they needed more info (they wanted to know every place he had ever lived and every person he had lived with since 1975.) Who knew. We provided the info and sent it back, hopefully the various college roomates he lived with years ago are upstanding, honest citizens now.

I had to have my medical papers redone (Dr. forgot to mark no to Wassermans, and Vito asked if I had something to tell him....I am clean and the Dr. fixed it :-)) Picked them up and shipped them off to be apostilled...again.

I decided to call the FBI to find out where our long over due clearance records were. They were yet to even be entered in the system. I asked if there was anyway they could expedite them. She asked what they were for, and when I told her our international adoption she said she would find out where they were. The next day (Friday night at 7pm) we received a call from the FBI to tell me they found them and would start processing them that night. Needless to say we received them the following week. Again...both clean. Yeah for the FBI!

Our last glitch was the state of MA refusing to apostille Vito's work verification because the notary did not use the "official notary language". We called the state to get specific requirements and then called to get a new letter. We are just waiting for that one to come in the mail.

On the bright side, we had another meeting with Erin, our social worker. We went over the homestudy she had written, handed over many documents, and went over financial info. She works side by side with the agency and I must say they have been really great to work with so far. We were able to meet in Lina's office and see her wall of pictures of all of the beautiful children that she was apart of adopting. The only thing we are waiting on to complete our homestudy is the child abuse clearance documents from the former states we have lived in.

Our social worker loaned us this movie called "5000 miles". It is a documentary about a couple who adopts a child from Poland. I highly recommend it for those of you who are adopting! It was really neat to see their experience and I have to admit many tears were shed.

Polish Festival and the Beach

Part of adopting from Poland, is a promise to teach the child about their birth country. We were fortunate to find a Polish Festival, this past weekend, in Castle Hayne, NC. We thought this would be a great place for us to learn a little more about Polish culture. The festival was a lot of fun, people were dressed up, there was a Polish band, and of course we ate a lot of Polish food. Since we were close to the beach we decided to spend the weekend there. We drove over to Wrightsville beach to let Scooter swim. We camped at Carolina Beach State Park (we camped there last summer and really liked it.) We spent the next day exploring Cape Fear and took a ferry from Fort Fisher to Southport. It turned out to be a great weekend....a taste of Poland, a walk along the beach, and a ferry ride all under a beautiful North Carolina blue sky!