Biometrics Appointment...Walk-In!

Two and a half weeks after our I800A was mailed to USCIS, we received our biometric fingerprinting appointment in the mail. We were so excited to open it...and then we saw that they assigned us to an appointment on this coming Tuesday, July 24th, when we will be out of town! The only rescheduling option on the appointment notice was to write a letter to the main office in Virginia and then they would mail a letter back to us with a new appointment. Ugh. I was thinking by the time we wrote the letter, received a letter back, and got home from our trip, it would delay us at least a week, if not more. So this Monday morning I called the USCIS headquarters and they said that the only option was to write the letter requesting a rescheduling. Bummer. Then I called L (our Lifeline representative - not sure if that's private or not?) and she said that sometimes people have success just walking in to the office they were assigned to and asking to just go ahead and do the fingerprinting. But, there's no way to call each individual office - everything goes through the main office in Virginia.

We thought about it for a few days - we were assigned to the closest office to us which was in Sugar Land (south Houston....1 hour away). So driving up there on the chance that they would take walk-ins meant Randy taking a half day of vacation and making the 2 hour round trip, which is a lot of gas! All for the chance that they would take us early or possibly send us right back home and tell us to reschedule. Randy and I both did some research and we decided from some things we were hearing that it was worth the risk to go up there.

So yesterday morning, we got up super early, pulled the girls out of bed at 7 and put them straight in the car in their pajamas and set out for Sugar Land - praying the whole way! When we got there a little after 8 when they opened, Randy went in to see about us walking in and I started to get the girls out of their seats and try to get the clothes on them that I had brought. He came back out pretty fast and said, "Let's go! Just grab the girls in their pajamas - there is no wait and they said they would take us now!!" SOOO excited!! We were in and out in ten minutes and now we have our biometrics DONE!!

When we got back in the car, Randy said, "Who wants to go for celebration pancakes?!" Both the girls screamed "yes!" so we found the closest Dennys and had breakfast with them in their pajamas still. Such a fun way to celebrate - and such a fun thing to be celebrating! :)

So what does all this mean? Why are we so excited? Our immigration approval is waiting on those fingerprints. The latest I've heard is that we could possibly receive our approval notice 5 business days from yesterday. So we could possibly come home from our trip to Ft.Worth on the 30th and have our approval in the mail!!

This week I sent the final documents for our dossier to L so she could make sure they were all ready to go to the authentication and certification stage. Once we have our immigration approval, we'll scan it, email it to her, she will add it to the 12 other documents that go in our dossier and she will send it off for certification and authentication. This typically takes 2-3 weeks. THEN....we will be ready to send our dossier to China!!! L said we could do this 2 or 3 days before my birthday on August 24th, so we may still have everything by then.

Finally, just a quick summary of what happens after that: After your dossier gets to China, it takes about 2-3 weeks to get a Log-in Date. Once you have this, you are eligible to start receiving referrals (a referral is a file of a child we could adopt!) Referrals are typically made when the Shared List comes out once a month, and this is usually at the end of the month (around the 23rd-25th?). So, if we have our dossier there at the end of August, get a log-in date mid-September, I think we could possibly start receiving referrals when the September shared list is released! Ahhh!!! We are prepared to wait several months for our little girl's referral, but just knowing that we will possibly be logged-in so soon is super super exciting.

Thanks for reading all this if you have stayed with me this long. We are excited and are excited to share our journey with you!