Well, we should be requesting an embassy appt. today! Everything has been taken care of according to the national visa center. Hopefully the embassy will respond fast and give us a very soon appt. date. (Not counting on that at all- in fact I will not be surprised if it takes closer to 2 months for the appt. given the last few families that had to wait.)

Our home study agency contacted us and said that we need to rerun our background checks for our state- we don't need new prints, just to spend $140 to do a search. It never ends does it?

I am frantically trying to keep track of all these receipts for the adoption credit, but that hasn't been going well for families either. I have read several news articles on it, and talked to a couple of families who are being audited. Apparently the govt. isn't sure what they are going to allow as far as fees to count towards the credit refund for us. I have not been able to find one family that has gotten the full amount from the govt. that their accountant said they would. I am only hoping that by the time it comes for us to file the paperwork next tax season they will have it all sorted out and it will be relatively painless for us.

A friend and I got together last week so she could teach me to bake bread. This led to some googling on the internet, which somehow led to the plan that our two families were going to have month of May be "processed free food month"

yep, for the ENTIRE month of May we are not going to eat any processed foods. For sure we will have the exception of milk, because we do not live near a dairy farm where we could get unpasteurized, and there may be a couple of other things along the way. But this means essentially nothing canned or jarred, no cereal (oh how I will miss that!) no store bought bread, mac and cheese, candy, ice cream, juice, sugar, etc.- you get the idea.

I went grocery shopping yesterday and that was a tad overwhelming. Pretty much nothing from the inside aisles of the store. Not to mention that I spent a fair amount of money on all of that fresh produce.

My kids are greedily sucking down the remainder of their easter candy today, and everyone in the family had the last chocolate cereal that was in the cupboard.

If anyone has any good tips, recipes or websites to make this easier on us I would appreciate it. I am mostly worried about lunch where we tend to grab fast things from the pantry, but when you aren't eating anything processed, fast is not an option. I need to sit down and seriously come up with a plan.

I'll let you know how it goes!

Frustrated

So we have hit yet another snag, that tends to be our game. This time, the national visa center said that when we tried to set up our embassy appt. that they had us on file for adopting one child out of Ethiopia. I tried to tell them that I was physically holding our approvals for two out of DRC. But no dice. We can't move forward until they receive physical evidence from USCIS that we are indeed adopting two out of DRC. The visa center should have received this a year ago when we switched countries, but apparently it didn't happen.

Hopefully this will not be too long of a delay. Until then we can't even request an embassy date. The visa center should be receiving our I600 approvals some time today, and hopefully they can then see that yes we switched countries, change that in their computer and off we go. We'll see. What seems so simple for me may be a whole lot harder for the government.

I600 approval!

We have our I600 approval! Yeah! And the best thing is it only took 3 1/2 weeks to receive the news that we were approved. The hard copy is yet to come in the mail, but I am okay with that!

Next step- embassy appointment. I know that this has been taking quite awhile to get, as well as the visa following it, but I am staying positive and praying a lot that our process will move supernaturally fast. I know that if God wants us to move quickly it will happen. Our agency actually requested the appt. but apparently the National visa center hasn't received the hard copy yet either, so we weren't technically in their system and they were a little confused. I called USCIS and the woman that I talked to said she doesn't understand it, but after you get approved it takes about a week for the papers to move out of the building and onward to where they should be. I don't know if this will delay us a little bit if they don't let us request an appt. until the visa center gets our approval our not. Regardless, it shouldn't be too much of a delay.

So pumped to be at this point. May 1st officially marks one year in this program, and having our I600 approval is a good place to be!

Seriously people- we have baby chickens. I never in a million years thought this was going to work. So much so that we didn't buy the things necessary once they hatch, like a heat lamp, and food and all that stuff.

Last night about 8:00 Chris says "I think I hear a chicken." No you don't, the window is open, it must be a robin. because in my mind I am thinking that these eggs spent some time at 108 degrees, which isn't supposed to happen, and we basically fried them before they even had a chance. We heard it a second time and ignored it then too. But when we put the kids down for bed we peeked, and unbelievably there was a chicken!

We hatched 3, but I am not sure one of them is going to make it. I had to help him out this morning after he spent 14 hours trying to come out on his own and didn't make it. Still no idea what it is that we are going to do with chickens IN THE CITY. And really hoping our city officials don't see them because technically we are not supposed to have poultry where we live.

Should be interesting.

So I hung up on USCIS today. Last Friday I talked to our caseworker about where we sat with things, today I decided just to call and speak to the people who answer the phone before transferring you. The woman I spoke to said that it looked like our
I600 was done but that our officer hadn't updated the status yet. So then she transferred me back to our officer, that's the point that I then hung up the phone. See, I don't want this poor woman to think that I am some sort of crazy adoptive parent (even if it's true!) and since I just talked to her, I decided the best option was to hang up! I wonder at what point this week it would be okay to call her again.....

On other news, the house next to us has people moving into it. It has been empty for almost two years after the family before went through a nasty divorce and left it. I have mixed feelings about getting people finally. I know that it's good if we ever want to sell our house to have people actually living in the homes next to us. But it has been so nice not having anyone near us on that side, plus our bedroom window faces their house, so now I have to be concious of when I am dressing and all those things.

We haven't had a chance to meet them yet because it appears that they are moving slowly into the house and aren't spending the nights yet. Chances are probably pretty good that they are nice people. But I still worry about those so called neightbors from he**. I have many friends with lots of wonderful stories about those types of neighbors.

Yet another reason I want to move out into the country. But we knew by adopting that we would be staying put in this house for quite some time.

I keep telling Chris we need to put up a privay fence, but our yard is huge and it's just not a financial priority right now. Plus Chris tells me that I am being anti-social by doing that. We'll see what happens when the kidlets get home and we are trying to contain two one year olds on our own! (Not to mention the other two kids who spend most of their outside time in trees)

Talked to our caseofficer this morning about Chris' prints. Everything looked great and she said that she would be giving our case to her superior for a final look through today. yeah! I am not planning on the superior being able to look at it and approve it all on a Friday, but if that should happen I would be ecstatic. Realistically, I am still thinking next week. Our officer said she would email as soon as she got the approval to let me know so I didn't have to wait until it came in the snail mail.