Adoption Timeline

I have had several people ask the question, "So, when are you going to get your babies?" My reply, "Good question...probably a long time!" Of course, that's the short, non-descriptive answer and if that's good enough for you, you may want to stop reading here! ;) But for those of you who would like details, this post is for you. :)

P.S. One day I'm going to get the timeline on the home page of my blog, along with a button, pages, etc. etc. :)

So, here goes:

This Thursday, we will send our first home study fee along with our Home Study Agreement to CHI.

When they receive the agreement, they will send us a list of all the documents that we need in order to begin the home study. (*We have been frantically getting all of this together, so as soon as we get the list, we should have the documents ready to send in. :))

Once they receive our documents, our social worker will begin our home visits and will write our home study. We will pay the rest of our home study fee and our post-adoption agreement fee at this point.

When we receive our home study, we will send in our I-600A along with our $830 fee to the CIS and will wait for our fingerprint appointments.

Once we have done our fingerprinting, we will wait for our 1-171H and fingerprint approvals.

At this time, we will complete our dossier collection and complete the parenting workshops.

Then, we will send our dossier, our preparation fees, and our authentication fees totalling $4100 to CHI, who will take care of sending them to DC for authentication at which time we will be an official waiting family!!

**This document collection and processing period is supposed to take 3-6 months.

At this point, we will do just what the name suggests...we will wait for our referral. We were told that we should expect to wait 15 months for our referral since we are wanting to adopt two of such a young age.

Once we have received and accepted our referral, we will send in our $10, 735 referral fee.

We will wait approximately 1.5-3 months for our court date and will arrange travel at that time (Travel Expenses=$6,000-8,000).

We will travel to Ethiopia for our court date and to meet our babies at this time (the trip is supposed to last approximately 5 days).

We will then return to the states (without our babies):( and will wait until we can go get them 5-6 weeks later.

We'll travel to Ethiopia, get our babies, return home with them and CELEBRATE!!!!

So, there you go...the long answer! ;)

P.S. Don't forget if you want to help us out and get some really cool gear in the process, you can click http://teamchase4andcounting.blogspot.com/2010/08/application-approved.html :)

I'm leaving you with this last little thought (oh, how I love this boy!)