homestudy complete and CNN story

Great, unexpected news today! The missing Illinois fingerprints showed up today at our social work agency! We were expecting to have to wait a few weeks to get that whole situation worked out. But now we can move on to the next step!!

The social worker is now adding the fingerprinting results into our homestudy and getting the completed, notarized document to us soon. We should have it by next week. Then we have to send a copy of it to the US Customs and Immigration Department. Once they receive it, they will schedule a fingerprinting date for us (yes, more fingerprints!). The results for those fingerprints generally take about six weeks or so to get back. In the meantime, the US will review our homestudy to give us permission to adopt. The whole process could take from one month to more than three months. We will do our best to beg and plead for them to review our homestudy quickly and expedite the process. We are hoping that they will take into consideration that Caleb is older, has special needs, and is in the earthquake region.

After we get the ok from our country, then we can finally send all of our documents to China. Then a new countdown will begin.

On another note, there is a great CNN story about a family that just adopted a little girl from the orphanage that Caleb is in. I actually met Michele via a blog of hers that I just happened to stumble upon when I was trying to find out about ChengDu and the orphanage. She and her husband actually hand-delivered a gift to Caleb a few weeks ago and got to see him! They have been such a huge blessing to us. Their newly adopted daughter, Sophie, and Caleb were friends in the orphange and they slept in the same room! Check out the short CNN story of them at this link:
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/06/26/lah.quake.adoption.cnniref=videosearch

If I can figure out how to go back to my previous post, I will try to finish up our "where we have been" story. Like I said earlier, I am not so good at short and concise. julia.