8/23/08 - Completed Online Training

We have completed our 8 online training hours required by America World! We learned tons about the whole process from beginning to middle to end of the adoption and then some! We also saw many great video clips from adoptive parents and adoptees which gave us great insight into the process.

NEXT STEPS: We have 10 hours of training required by Lutheran Child and Family Services that we will attend the first Wednesday and Saturday of September.

PRAISE AND PRAYER: Praise for all the information and insight from the online training - it helped us answer questions at our home study meeting! Prayer for safe travel to the training in September and that Mike makes it to work on time that Wednesday.

8/21/08 - Meeting with Our Social Worker Faith

We met with Faith this morning to update our home study for an international adoption. She went through our previous home study, updating ages, years of employment, etc. Then we had to answer some new questions mainly why Ethiopia and how will we raise a child of another culture and race. We have a few papers to complete, sign, and return, but nothing requiring too much work. We also were able to have the question about when to send in the I600A form into USCIS - end of September!

NEXT STEPS: We plan on completing the paperwork, signing it, getting it notarized, and sending it back to Faith by the end of August. We also are able to begin gathering documents for our dossier.

PRAISE AND PRAYER: Praise for the SUPER visit with Faith and her excitement for us! Prayer that we would be able to finish the paperwork and get it in the mail by Labor Day. Prayer also for our home study - it has to be approved by 4 different people/agencies before we get a copy for our dossier.

8/14/08 - Amy Learns Something About Email Attachments

Amy went back to the email we received from America World which included Ethiopia and Dossier Guidelines attachments and discovered something interesting - when there are lots of attachments to an email, you can scroll up and down to see them all!! So she discovered about 16 pages of forms and instructions and printed them all out! Oops!!

NEXT STEPS: We will be meeting with our social worker Faith next Thursday, August 21st to begin the process of updating our homestudy. At that time we will also talk with her about the I600A form we are waiting to send in. We are hoping to finish our online adoption training for America World by the end of this month.

PRAISE AND PRAYER: Praise that we handled the email attachment mix up with a sense of humor! Prayer for our meeting with Faith next week - that everything would be quick (as quick as possible) and relatively painless! Pray also that we would not have any computer problems as we are trying to finish our online training.