Updated Home Visit

Hello Everyone,
I apologize for the tardiness of this post. Life has been in fast-forward the last few weeks and I am hoping it will slow down now that Philip has finished his EMT training.

This past Tuesday, Cathy came to do a second home visit so that it will be up to date when we send in our dossier. We all sat down during that meeting and filled out all the special needs we think we, or our house, are equipped to handle. That was a little more difficult to do than I expected because I felt like for every "no" we said, there was a child in front of me that I was shaking my head at. In the end, we did say no to most because we already have three young children and time or attention-consuming issues just isn't possible for us right now. We answered what we felt was best for all the children. Anyway, we got that form filled out and now Cathy is in the process of writing up our homestudy right now. She expects that to take about 3 weeks. In the meantime, I have to re-do our medical forms and send more fingerprints in to a different FBI office. I will also be working on filling out the I800A form for Immigration (about 13 pages long). Cathy will send our homestudy to Holt for their approval, then send it to a State of Illinois office for their approval. Once we get that approval, we will send in the I800A and we will receive our appointment in Chicago for yet more fingerprinting. Once we get the thumbs up from Immigration, that is when we send our Dossier to Bulgaria. We estimate 18 months from when we send that in to when we bring our little girl home- God willing.

As a side note, the insurance company was finally able to get someone out to my parents' home to survery damage from Hurricane Ike on Thursday. Their house roof, pump house roof, and barn (a tree fell on it) were all totalled. My sister and her husband had very little damage. They had a screened in porch and all the screens were torn up. They pretty much just had debris clean up. The same goes for my grandparents, my aunt, and my uncle's homes. Praise God for everyone's safety and for the minimal damage!