Homestudy complete

Doing the Happy Dance!!


So, we just found out today that our homestudy is complete, and has been approved by both our homestudy agency and our int'l agency. This is great news! Now the HS agency will mail the HS to the San Francisco USCIS office. We have already mailed in our I-600a.
Next week we will attend a "Medical Issues in International Adoption" workshop at our local HS agency. Should be pretty informative. Or scary. Ugh. Better to know all of the possibilities.
*So I just re-read this post and it sounds like a foreign language, all of the adoption verbage.
It is sure a quick learning curve. A couple of months ago I wouldn't have had any idea what all of that stuff meant.

State Criminal Clearance...Cali style

I wanted to give a heads up to those of you living in California and are going through an international adoption. One of the things we had to do was to get a State Criminal Clearance Letter as part of our dossier that will be sent to Ethiopia.
I had NO IDEA how to get started on this. I knew we needed to get fingerprinted...AGAIN. So I checked around with veterans in this process, and here's what I found out.
The most useful information I got was from a blog that I have been following.
http://www.ethiopianadoptionstory.blogspot.com/

There is SO MUCH helpful info to be found on this blog. Just scroll down a bit and on the left hand side is a list of paperwork and links to all the paperwork muck.

I took this some of the wording/links straight from this blog. It was sooooo helpful to me (Hope the author doesn't mind. She did such an amazing job at creating the links)!

Refer to this website - Office of the Attorney General DOJ. Take note of the far right hand column about half-way down - the information about "Visa/Immigration and Foreign Adoptions".

Download this form, as instructed.

Fill it out using this guideline.

Find a Livescan facility to get your fingerprints done (this is a separate livescan from the one you do for your homestudy agency; and they cannot 'save' fingerprints on the computer, so you have to do it twice, and pay twice).

They will mail you a printout to your home - no criminal record may take 1 day. Yes criminal record? Can take a month or so.

We recv'd letter in the mail. Took 1 day to process. It looked very unofficial and didn't have a seal on it. The DOJ WILL NOT notarize their clearance letter. It is a state agency, therefore it's inherently notarized. You only need to take the official letter and printout to Sacramento to get it authenticated.

But I found out that we, in fact, were mailed the wrong letter. Guy at DOJ says we marked the wrong box at the top of the Livescan form. We simply followed the directions on their sight. Anyhow, you are supposed to receive 2 papers. One is the official looking paper with the seal and the other is a printout showing no criminal record.


See this post for more details.

Let's get acquainted!

The whole fandamily...


The dog.






Take a peek under that hat. Yup. The "c" word. Adoption, here we come.





Kiddo born 2 mos. premature. We were bound for adoption...


Here are a few pics from the last few years. They are just a glimpse into what we are all about. Thanks for checking us out!

Getting started here...

So, I feel like I've been selfish. I have read so many blogs about Ethiopian adoptions, but I haven't offered my own experiences in this arena. Not fair. I have to give back to this community. So here goes.
And who knows. Maybe it will be cathartic. Maybe it will be a waste of time. Maybe I will shed some light on this process for someone who is unsure, uncertain, hesitant or scared.
So please allow me to tell those of you about myself and how I (we) got to this point. I am going to refrain from using too much super personal info, as I have to be sure to protect the
privacy of my family. Not that we are all that interesting to begin with. Just being cautious.
We have one daughter. We'll call her Ms. Independent. Cuz that's what she is! She is almost 4 yrs old. Hubby and I, we'll call him Mr. Jack-of-all-trades, or Jack for short, have been married for over 5 yrs.
Due to medical issues (for those of you who know us, you know what I'm talking about) we have chosen to adopt a child. A sibling for Ms. Indpendence. And we were lead to Ethiopia.
So far we have had met with our social worker and she has just submitted our homestudy to our local adoption agency. We have submitted an application to our international agency and gathered all of our paperwork. We officially started all of this in February/March. So not so bad so far. The paperwork has been a bit rough, but doable.
So, here goes...Hold your breath. It's going to be a bumpy ride!