DNA Test

Hannah went in for her DNA test yesterday along with her birth mother. The US government requires this test to make sure the woman giving up the baby is the birth mother. They will also perform a second DNA test at the end of the adoption process to make sure it's still Hannah!

Paperwork To Austin

We received our FBI letters via FedEx today and sent them right off along with the rest of our paperwork to Austin for certification by the Secretary of State. This is the paperwork for adoption #2.

Waiting On FBI Again for Dossier #2

We've collected all our paperwork for our second dossier except we're waiting on the FBI for our fingerprints and letter. Everything has been checked by our case manager and approved. Once we receive the FBI letters we'll send all our paperwork off to Austin for certification and Houston for authentication.

Back Home

We came home Tuesday from Guatemala. It was a great trip and it was really wonderful to get to spend time with Hannah! It was sad having to leave her! We took over 800 pictures so we couldn't help but share a few more!

Buenas tardes from Guatemala!

Buenas tardes from Guatemala! We´re having a wonderful time with Hannah Faith. She is a great baby. She´s very content, very happy, and sleeps alot. Joel really likes her and is having fun with his new baby sister. We can´t leave the hotel with her so we´re spending alot of time in our room and down in the lobby and shops of our hotel and the Westin which is connected to ours. Hope you enjoy the pics!

Hannah Faith

We´re having a wonderful time in Guatemala with our baby girl, Hannah Faith! We made it to Guatemala safely (although we thought our flight might be diverted to El Salvador for awhile because of weather!) and will be here until next Tuesday. We signed our POA this morning and met our baby girl for the first time. She is absolutely amazing and we´re all enjoying her so much! Here´s a few pics we wanted to share...

Our Baby Girl!

We received a phone call this evening about our baby girl! Here she is! She was born on October 2nd and weighed 6lbs 12oz. We're still deciding on her name. She's beautiful and a wonderful gift from God! We're hoping to be in Guatemala by Friday to sign our POA and see the newest addition to our family. She'll get to stay with us at our hotel the entire time we're there but she won't get to come home with us for another 6-8 months.

Paperchasing Again

We've decided to try to adopt a second baby from Guatemala! Because of the uncertainty on the future of Guatemalan adoptions, we decided to pursue a second adoption now. There still are no guarantees but we're hoping for the best. Our agency has told us that they don't know yet if they will have enough babies in their program for every family before the Guatemalan government shuts down adoptions. They're trying hard to help as many babies as they can and will try to match us up with a second baby. They stopped taking new application at the end of September so we're on the very tale end of the list. So, we're paperchasing again, trying to put together a second dossier to submit for our second baby. Our home study already approved us for up to 3 kids and our I-171H is good for up to to 3 kids. We're waiting on the FBI for fingerprint checks again and we're gathering up the rest of the documents in the mean time. We've sent off documents to Missouri again for State certification and from there they will be sent to a courier in Chicago to be authenticated at the Guatemalan Consulate. Jason had our doctor sign medical letters today and got his employment letter signed. Shannon requested a medical letter for Joel and we hope to pick it up tomorrow. We're expecting our referral for baby #1 any day now so we're really trying to get this second dossier wrapped up as soon as possible since we could be leaving the country at any time.

I-171H

We finally received our I-171H!!!! This document from the US government is what we have to have in order to accept a referral from our adoption agency. Now we're just waiting on our adoption agency to match us up with a baby. It could happen anytime from tomorrow to several weeks from now. We've started preparing for our trip to Guatemala to sign our power of attorney. We plan on leaving within a day or two after receiving our referral. We'll be down there for around 5 days and we'll get to see our baby girl! We're really excited!

Garage Sale

We had a garage sale over the weekend to raise money for our adoption. We generated $275 out of it. It was our first garage sale since we'd been married. It went really well and Joel seemed to really enjoy it. It was a real blessing when one stranger walked away and then came back and handed us $10 saying he wanted it to help with the adoption.

Letter from US Government

While we were expecting to get our I171H from the government, we ended up getting a letter last week stating that we had not supplied 2 documents (one for each of us) regarding our child abuse registry checks by our social worker. She had performed the checks and stated so in the home study but failed to send us a copy of the documents to pass on to USCIS. We didn't even know we needed to send them and wasn't stated anywhere by the government. So, we had to get our social worker to fax them to USCIS. We're hoping it doesn't cause a long delay. She faxed them today.