On Saturday we finally received our I-171H in the mail. This is the "biggie" that basically says we have been approved and can officially adopt and orphan, YEAH! Once we send it out for certification and authentication, which only takes a couple of days, we can submit our dossier to our agency, but..............before we do that we need to wait for Kathleen. She is a few weeks behind us because she had a small delay with her homestudy, but we think all is resolved now and we hope it won't take her too long to receive her I-171H.
We have also learned since our last post that things aren't moving as quick as we had thought with our agency and Vietnam. They are now saying it will take 2-4 months for a referral after our dossier is submitted and another 2-4 months to travel after receiving our referral, so that puts us sometime between September and December again.
In the meantime it gives us more time to prepare. We still have a nursery to put together. So far we have chosen a theme (see picture left), found a crib and a couple of pictures for the walls, and obtained lots of girl clothes from many different sources. Andy and the boys bought me a sewing machine for Mother's Day so I have been having fun making all kinds of "little things".
I have also posted 3 pictures along with this post. One is a picture of some babies in one of the orphanages that our agency deals with over in Vietnam. It is really sad to see how they just line them up on the floor. They don't have cribs in a lot of the orphanages over there like they do in other countries. The other picture is the theme for Maddie's nursery, it is called fashion frogs. The third picture is our "ultrasound" I actually got it off of another family's blog. I have also added another website under favorite links called pictures of Vietnam. It is a website that has hundreds of pictures of Vietnam for anyone interested in seeing more of the country.
We will post again once we reach another major turning point in our process (hopefully soon!)
