We are coming to the end of the year! This last month God has smiled upon us in ways we never could have imagined!(It has been such a great month that the ! will be used liberally.)
First, our boys have been so great through this whole process. We have found them to be more and more generous. They accepted having a smaller Christmas due to saving money for the adoption and it has shown us that it is more about family time than material goods.
We attended Dave's company Christmas Party. It was a nice change to talk to other adults rather than conversations with my two year old consisting of yogurt and the Cars movie.
In adoption news, we finished our ATK(acceptance to Korea to adopt our baby) on the 15th of December, we got our Biometrics appointment for our I-600a (petition to bring an orphan into the country) at the USCIS office on Thursday last week and our adoption agency said she is sending our Dossier to Korea this week! This all couldn't have been accomplished as quickly if we had not gotten a great and very generous grant from Sacred Selections. They called me the day after I received a very large bill from our Agency to move forward with our paperwork.
The remarkable part of this is, Dave was out of town when I got the bill and that night I prayed that we would find a way to overcome the money road block. God once again reassured me of His hand in this.
We are not allowed to post pictures of our girl until we take custody but I can assure you I look at her picture and my heart hurts every day that goes by that I am not holding her. But I am so thankful for the process moving smoothly so far.
The timeline from here on out gets blurry and very unpredictable. We now wait for the US to approve our petition. Then for Korea's Ministry for Health and Welfare to approve us and get an EP submission (Korea only approves so many EPs a year for orphans to be adopted) after EP submission, it gets approved and then a court date is issued. There is not a rhyme or reason to the timing on this. Some have been submitted a month after dossier goes to Korea and some wait 3 months. Then between EP submission and approval it can be up to an additional 4 months. So we could be in for a long wait.
But we know God is in control and I am so thankful for all the steps we made this month.
We are also so thankful for you and all the donations made. We still are fundraising for travel and back pay for all the fees we have already paid to WACAP.
We are so thankful for every year God has granted us and 2016 has been memorable. AAAAAND 2017, I will have my girl in my arms!
