One small step for the Browns...

...One giant leap for our home study!

We found out today that both of our FBI background checks came back on Friday and, as I suspected, we're relatively upstanding citizens. Sweet! And, we finished 14 hours of training time this weekend.

Check and CHECK! That's the sound of my home study list getting shorter. To finish our home study we're now waiting on:

• Letter from J's doctor
• My dr. appt next week and letter from him
• Fletcher's doctor's form
• Marc's doctor's letter (in progress)
• Tax returns for 2007 (in progress)
• Home safety inspection follow up (3/10)

We're "this close" to being done with this phase of the process and have started gathering (well, ordering at least) documents for our dossier. I think I'm eager to get the home study finished so that I can feel like I've completed or accomplished something, even thought it's just one step...

Any news?

So we get the question "Any news yet?" a lot. Unfortunately it's going to be a loooooooooong long long time before we have any real news. Right now we are still in the paperwork phase. This will probably last through spring. We hope to have our dossier on its way to Ethiopia by the beginning of the summer. Once the paperwork gets to Ethiopia, then we start waiting. This could be 6 to 18 months, maybe more, we just don't know.

Until then, I will bore you with the very minute details and triumphs... :)

Marc's fingerprints came back yesterday! Whohoooo! Now we have both received CBI and are waiting on FBI. Our social worker says they usually run about two weeks behind CBI. This is excellent news because we expected to be waiting until the end of April to receive these.

For our Dossier (mountain #2 of paperwork) I have ordered our birth and marriage certificates, but have only about 10% confidence that the birth certificates are going to be correct. The lady laughed when I told her that they "must be certified and sealed with the Great Seal of the State" (I really need to get triumphant sounding music to play when I said "Great Seal of the State".). She said she didn't know what that meant, but she'd send me a certified copy with a seal on it. We shall see...

The costs are starting to pile up in little bits and pieces (especially if these are the wrong birth certificates).

Birth Certs for Kellie $36
Birth Certs for Marc $35.50
Marriage Certs $33
Marc's copay for dr. appt $25
Kellie's copay for dr. appt $25

Total: $154.50

Oh.My.Goodness.

Got this note from our social worker today:

Good news- Surprisingly I received Kellie's CBI background check results back today!!! This is about half the time as the families I last approved. Anyway, that means that I should be receiving Marc's soon and also both of your FBI results in about 2 weeks (as they usually follow about two weeks behind CBI). Sometimes we do get one person's results a week or two before the other's.

Somebody high five me! We sent our fingerprints in on 12/28. We figured, with the holidays, that no one even saw them until after the 1st of the year and that we wouldn't get anything back until April.

Oh no, this means all that dossier paperwork that we were going to get around to in the next few months needs to be started..............now! Wahoooooooooo!