We got our appointment to get fingerprinted for our approval right before we left town for Thanksgiving. Our appointment was on December 15th, at 8:00am. We got there and got that all done with no problems, and then went home and waited a few days before calling USCIS to try to find out the status of our case. The woman that I spoke with, name Gretchen, was very helpful, and told me that our fingerprints were on the 15th, and that our approval was on the 16th......several weeks sooner than we expected it to come through! Praise God! In fact, that next Monday, we got our approval letter in the mail, so I contacted Gretchen back again and asked her if there was a way to expedite our next step, the I-800 approval. She told me that in extreme medical cases they will, and it takes the process down from 4-6 weeks to more like 1-2 weeks. Well, I e-mailed her the letter that Dr. Dadlani had written a while ago stating that Will's health was fading fast and that it was crucial to get him here NOW, and she called me back 30 minutes later. Her exact words were "That poor baby. I talked to my supervisor, and if you can get us the child study report and all necessary information, I can get it done today. Of course we will expedite it for you. In fact, my supervisor said that we will overnight it to the National Visa Center once it's done so that they can send the approval on to India for you." This woman was amazing! Well, we didn't even have the Child Study report from our agency yet, because they won't send it until we get our I-800a approval and we had just gotten it that day. So, I e-mailed them a copy of our approval, and they sent the report that we needed via Fed Ex. Things were held up a couple of days because of Christmas and offices closing for the Holiday, but we got the paperwork, had our wonderful friend Jim notarize it all, sent it to USCIS, then overnighted it to Tallahassee to get apostilled. Whew! True to her word, Gretchen got it all done the day that she got it, and less than a week later, our approval paperwork was in India and they are now working on our Article 5 letter. That is needed to send to CARA (India's "everything adoption" agency that approves everything for us and ultimately decides whether or not we can have this particular child) and once they get the Article 5 letter, they will begin the process to issue our NOC.....our "No Objection Certificate". The Article 5 letter can take up to a month to get issued, but wonderful Gretchen wrote "expedite" all over the paperwork that she sent, so hopefully the US Consulate will get the message and just do it quickly. Let's pray that happens anyways. And then the NOC is only supposed to take 10-15 days, and shorter even for children with special needs. However, our agency has informed us that about 90% of the time, they reject the dossier for some reason and require more information and then it has to be resubmitted. ARGH! We are also praying that CARA will accept everything as is, and will issue the NOC quickly. Time is crucial here, as Will is certainly not getting any healthier as time goes on. Also, when we received the Child Study Report, there was a lot more information in it than what the agency had originally told us about him. We now know the circumstances of his birth and who his birth mother is, and I feel for this poor girl and the fact that because of social reasons, she had to give her baby to an orphanage. And that was all before there was a family assigned to him, so she didn't even know if he would ever be adopted. With his medical issues, she must have thought that it may have never happened. I feel blessed to be chosen to parent this baby, and we will never allow him to forget the sacrifice that his birth mom made for him. Anyways, I have tracked our UPS package from what went out to be apostilled, and it is out for delivery to us today. I am in the process of getting the last few documents together that the agency needed from us, and then will overnight everything to them to then forward on to India. Yay! Our dossier will travel to the orphanage and CARA while we wait for our Article 5 letter, and then we will get the ball rolling. We were told to expect about 6 more months.....they keep lengthening the time frame that they tell us......but we know that God is amazing and controls all things, and we will travel in His time. I am praying that it is more like February or March, although the agency tells me that this is unrealistic. We'll see. I just don't see us waiting until June, and having Will's health just decline more and more until then. One thing that I found odd was that in the child study report, all of the medical information was from when he was 6 months old, and then the surgical report from July, when he was 10 months old. There is nothing recent......so we don't even know if they have done an Echo or an EKG, or checked his O2 sats, or anything like that. No current length/weight, no idea what he is eating these days, nothing. So, I sent a list a questions to the agency today, and they have said that they will try to find some answers. In their words...."Well, we don't THINK he has had any other surgeries, but we don't really know." WHAT?!?!?!?! I was shocked and enraged by this.....how could you now know, and how is it that nobody is checking more carefully on a baby this ill? I guess maybe I don't understand how things work "over there", but I just feel that the agency should be pushing for more information. It's so frustrating. This will most likely be my last post of 2010. We are going to have another crazy year in 2011, but it will be a great one, as we will get to meet our boy!
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