I haven’t mentioned our current adoption much over the last couple of month because, well, there hasn’t been much to mention! Other than having our first of three homestudy visits, there’s been little movement. Our agency has one of the more popular and stable Ethiopia programs, and therefore has one of the longest waits. We were instructed when we applied that it would be a few months before we could really even get going on our dossier, and this was fine with us since it was only October when our three new Haitian kids came home.

The other day, however, I got an email from someone at the agency about which adoption education program we wanted to complete, so I knew there must have been a little movement in the right direction. On Saturday, I got a big packet of materials that I have to complete and send back, along with $2200. Ah, the fun part of adoption! Paying for it! Coincidentally, we have our second homestudy visit coming up on the 14th, and that will run us another $900 or so. Ugh.

So, today I officially began our dossier and requested the child abuse clearances and local criminal records check required for our homestudy. I created a financial statement for our homestudy agency and faxed it to our social worker, asked our pediatrician to write a medical clearance letter for our children, and emailed our insurance agent to ask for a statement indicating there is no pre-existing condition limitation with our policy. I’ve also started working on the documents our agency sent, and hope to have everything in the mail to them (along with the $2200 – ugh again!) by the end of the week. My husband and I will go have a couple of things notarized tomorrow, and then I’ll tackle our I600A. I’m dreading the 6-hour drive to get our fingerprints done and I get angry about it every time I think about it. We used to be able to drive to a town two hours away, but now that they require fingerprinting to be done right at the CIS office, it’s a real journey and hassle for us. I’m seriously thinking we might fly there and back so we can do it in one day and leave the kids with friends. It will probably be cheaper than 12 hours of driving, two hotel rooms and meals along the way.

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