Dear Family and Friends,
I haven't posted anything on the blog since May. Please forgive me! We had a busy summer with moving and travels. Clarion and I moved onto the Concordia Seminary campus in July. The move slowed down our adoption paperwork a bit, but things are definitely in full swing at this point.
About three weeks ago our Home Study was conducted. Our case worker from Children's Hope came over and spent about three hours with us. Clarion and I each answered questions about our marriage and about parenting and numerous others. Then she did a walk-through of our house with us, pointing out things we can do for safety measures, etc. It all went very well.
This weekend we received the final Home Study Report. I am happy to announce that it was "favorable." The agency has approved us for adoption. It's great news. This is now a big part of the process that is now complete.
This morning I sent a final, notarized copy of the Homestudy to US Citizenship & Immigration Services. Upon receipt of it, they should notify us to schedule a time for each of us to be fingerprinted. That is part of the process of being approved by CIS. The fingerprints have to be run through the FBI and come back with a report listing no record for either of us. This can take up to 90 days, so all of our paperwork won't be complete until that comes back.
We have a few more documents to finish and some to clean up a bit, then we should be pretty much done with our dossier. We should be able to get this done before (or by the time) our CIS approval comes in. Then it's time to wait for a referral. We've already been waiting several months as we've worked through the paperwork process. Once our dossier is done, the real waiting begins!
Thank you for your continued prayers. I'll try to do more frequent updates to the blog so that you're all well informed. The Lord be with you!
Joel & Clarion
