Baby steps

Well, we're one step further along in the process; tomorrow we will submit our USCIS I-600A form - Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition - to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). This informs the USCIS that we are intending to adopt a child from Ethiopia and gets us signed up for FBI fingerprinting. We had to dig up our marriage license and birth certificates and send in a copy of them; it's pretty interesting to see the info they recorded back in the day - FYI, I was born at 11:40PM. Anyway, off it goes!

We also are in the process of getting started with our home study. We have a (tentative) first meeting with our social worker next week. This orientation meeting will be one of three with her and serves to get the ball rolling and cover the basics (we assume). The next two meetings will be here at our house to look the place over and get into the nitty-gritty of parenting an adopted child from another culture. We'll let you know how things go and what's next.

-- cale