New Year Update

Happy New Year! 2011 was a whirlwind of a year, it feels like we just celebrated the 2011 New Year and here we are in 2012. The past year was filled with many blessings as we bought our house and moved in earlier in the year, spent time with family and friends, celebrated our children's birthdays, hubby took me on a getaway, and we found our baby girl in Eastern Europe and started on this journey to bring her home. We are thankful for all that God has done and is doing in our family!

We've had many people asking us where we're at in the process so I wanted to give everyone an update and ask you to pray for some specific things. So here it goes...

-Last week we took our fingerprint appt letters to our local USCIS office and prayed they would let us walk in ahead of our date. Our date is scheduled for January 12th, but some friends of ours who have adopted told us the office allows walk ins so we decided to try hoping this would speed up our USCIS approval. Everyone in the office was very kind and we were able to get them done. My skin gets very dry in the winter so 4 of my 10 fingers didn't show up well. The lady doing the prints explained that I may be asked to do it again. Please pray that my prints will be accepted so we won't be delayed any further.

-I've called USCIS multiple times to ask if my prints have been accepted or rejected and told each time that we don't have a case worker assigned to us yet. The case worker will decide if I need to redo them. Please pray that we will have someone assigned to us very soon so we can get our approval ASAP!

-We traveled to our capital city to have our dossier docs apostilled last week. They are done and we should be sending the dossier (minus USCIS approval form) over today!! Please pray it will arrive safely and our facilitators will get it translated with ease!

Overall, we're praying for USCIS approval quickly so we can have our complete dossier in our facilitator's hands ASAP as they still have to translate it and submit it for pre-approval before it can be fully submitted. We're hoping it can be logged in with the country's govt by the beginning of February. Even though that seems unlikely at this point, we know our God is so much bigger than this process and can do what seems impossible!

Please pray for us as we wait to patiently trust in Him - this process is definitely testing us and we want to glorify God each step of the way! We know He loves our daughter more than we ever could and His timing his perfect even when we don't understand it. Thank you for your words of encouragement and prayers, they are precious to us!