Moving Past Fear to Productivity!

"Faith means living with uncertainty - feeling your way through life, 

letting your heart guide you like a lantern in the dark."

~Dan Millman~

When I started blogging, the only purpose was to keep people up to date on our first adoption.  That was nearly all I talked about.  Even when we were in process with Selam, we kept fairly regular updates.  Yet, I haven't said much about JS's adoption here...

The truth is we discovered a procedural issue that we feared would possibly prevent us from moving forward and it took over 3 weeks to resolve. It isn't terribly important what the issue was, but at the time we were concerned.  (And 3 weeks is an ETERNITY when you are waiting for something like this!)  

Mark and I both found ourselves stepping back.  I think this was a subconscious decision to protect our hearts - if this adoption was not going to work, we did not want to invest our hearts into it.  Yet, we continued to plug along with our training requirements and piles of paperwork. Do you have any idea how tedious adoption paperwork is when you are protecting your heart?!  Um, yeah.  : / 

Long story short, the issue appears resolved and we are back on track!  We got this news late last week, right around the time we found out our homestudy and psychological reports were done. BAM. Things are moving again! As a result, Mark and I spent hours last night, organizing paperwork and finishing up some last minute letters and documents. And, because I am anal about adoption paperwork, it all ended up in various colored and labeled folders. :) Some people might find this funny since I am so messy and disorganized with much of my life.  But adoption paperwork is different. :)

So, for those interested in a quick update, we will be picking up our completed and notarized homestudy update this afternoon, which means we can (finally) fire off our I-800A immigration application tomorrow!  Our entire dossier is pretty much completed, minus I800A approval.  This is pretty significant actually because our agency is going to allow us to get a head start on translation to keep our process moving along quickly.  

As a side note, we were required to get clearance from the FBI that we aren't crazy criminals. Usually this approval takes 8-9 weeks, but we received it in less than a month.  just another sign that things are falling into place again. :)

Just another cycle of hurry up and wait. :) Next couple of days will be a little hectic, getting documents where they need to be and hopefully getting our dossier approved so it can be apostled. But then will be another cycle of "wait".  Such is adoption.  But we are pleased that we are finally m.o.v.i.n.g. again.