10 more hours – we won’t be dumber I guess!

(I apologize now if this gets confusing. Welcome to the world of Russian adoptions.)

So after our homestudy was sent to DCFS for approval last week, we thought we would not work on any of the adoption ‘stuff’ for a bit. From the timeline we had in our head, our papers (aka dossier) wouldn’t be sent to Russia anyway until after we got our immigration approval back. And we can’t get immigration approval until we have our biometric fingerprints taken. And we can’t have our fingerprints taken until they schedule our appointment. And they can’t schedule our appointment until they have our homestudy which is sitting on someone’s desk for approval. Makes perfect sense right?!?

Well that timeline was used by our previous agency. Apparently our dossier will be sent over to Russia as soon as the homestudy is approved. The immigration approval just has to be done before trip number 2. Keep in mind the last time our dossier was sent to Russia we had Blake’s referral within one week. We know that was God’s timing and not the norm. We fully expect that wait to be much longer this go around. BUT we better be prepared to expect the unexpected as well. DCFS is averaging 4-6 weeks to approve homestudies plus there will be a little time to get everything sent to World Links. It is possible that we could get a referral as early as August! Wow - that is a huge wakeup call. Exciting but we have a lot to do to get everything in order. Of course there are a million and one things that can go wrong in all of this and that is the NORM, but we better get our rears in gear!

The other thing we learned yesterday is that we have to have 10 more education hours. My initial reaction was complete annoyance. We went through all of the information less than two years ago and the majority of the online classes we will have to take are 3 or more years old! But as a good friend of mine says “we won’t be dumber” for rereading the information. I actually decided it may even be interesting to reread some of it and see how it applied to Blake now that we have been through some of the stages. (Wow – look at that attitude change! I highly recommend the book Lord, Change My Attitude!)

So instead of taking a break, Justin and I will spend late nights in front of our laptops completing our online course and playing the never-ending what if game. You would think by now that we would learn our lesson that we can’t predict what God’s timing is going to be. For some reason we still feel the need to try to stay one step ahead of Him. Nothing like setting yourself up for failure!

Overall we are super excited about what lies ahead!