April 24

Great News!

Great News! Another For This Child adoptive family announced their referral of a beautiful baby girl last week. This family received their referral (or "match") just one day after their paperwork was complete! This was a huge surprise for them because the wait up until that point had been 6+ weeks for a girl. We are very encouraged by this news because it may mean that the waiting time for our referral of Isabella may be less than we had anticipated!!

The better news is that we faxed all of the documents that we have completed so far to our case-worker at For This Child for review and we are in great shape! We had two minor repairs to make, but they have both been taken care of. We will finish our dossier preparation tomorrow with the last two documents! Tomorrow night we will gather everything together, quadruple check everything, and prepare to FedEx our packet to the Secretary of State and Guatemalan Consulate. From the Consulate, our dossier will go to our agency in Dallas and then on to Guatemala for translation into Spanish.

The final part in this stage is waiting for approval from USCIS (formerly INS). This approval letter is called an I 171H. Once you have this letter and all of your documents have the correct seals, you are considered "paper ready" and are eligible to receive your referral.

We're almost there!!!

Most of the babies are 2-3 weeks old at the time they are referred to a family. For This Child does complete medical testing on all children before they are referred to a family. So, if we were to receive our I 171 H, say, four weeks from the date we submitted our application (the Yakima trip thing), and we were as blessed as that other family to have an immediate referral, Isabella could be born this week or next!!! Of course, there are a lot of "ifs" involved there, but you can see where a mom could get pretty excited. I keep guessing at timeframes and imagining birthdates. It's amazing to think my daughter, my baby girl, my Bella, is coming into the world very soon.

Irene and I have the best time ooohing and aaahing over baby clothes. Last night I was preparing a package to send to Guatemala and I was folding several tiny dresses. After a while of watching me, Irene said, "It's going to be like having a real live baby doll".

Well, sort of.