Our Home Study was done quite soon after our application to the agency was put in. It was an amazing process, you learn a lot about yourself, your partner, and how you both function under STRESS! A couple of interviews later the powers that be decided that we were fit to be parents.
After countless visits to the notary and mountains of paperwork we were ready to submit the paperwork for our Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition, an I-600A for those in the know. This is basically getting an approval to adopt a child from a foreign country from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS).
After MORE paperwork and some very high tech fingerprinting, we got on the list for a referral. A referral is when the adoption agency matches you with a child, based on the long checklist of preferences for a child (the checklist was 7 pages long and it was a very difficult thing for us to fill out). Until the adoption is finalized in the child's birth country, the adoptive parents are not guaranteed to adopt the referred child (more on this later).
It didn't matter to us, boy or girl, as long as the child was under the age of one at the time of referral. We were told it would be 1 to 3 months to get a referral and to expect it to be on the longer side. Three weeks later we got an email with this in it:
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| Sophia Tshikota 2 weeks old |
The Waiting Begins....
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