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.

Sold!

We're thankful to say that Jason's Camaro finally sold. He even got $1,000 more than he paid for it a year ago! What a blessing! We're glad to be done with it and we're about to need the money. :)

Steps From Here

We thought we'd share a brief overview of the steps we'll go through from where we are now. Here's the steps...

I-171H
This is a document that we'll be issued from the US government. We have to have this before we can be given a referral. Goverment definition...Notice of Favorable Determination Concerning Application for Advance Processing of an Orphan Petition.

Referral of baby girl
This is where we get matched up with our baby girl! We'll get a phone call with brief information about our baby and then we'll receive photos, medical report, and lab test results via email.

Power of Attorney (POA)
We have to sign our Power of Attorney (POA) so that a lawyer can handle the legal stuff for us in Guatemala. We can either sign this here and have it notarized, certified (in Austin), and authenticated (in Houston), mail it to Guatemala and then it would be registered, translated, and notarized in Guatemala OR we can travel to Guatemala and sign it in Spanish in person. We're leaning towards going to Guatemala. This could cut up to 4-5 weeks off our wait time and we'd get to see our baby girl while we're there.

DNA
The US requires DNA testing to be done on the birthmother and our baby to make sure it is the birthmother giving up the child. This is to protect children from being kidnapped and sold.

Family Court
This is where a social worker in Guatemala will review our home study and interviews the birthmother and foster mother. Family Court takes place on the Guatemalan side while Pre Approval is happening on the US side.

Pre Approval (PA)
This is where we are given pre approval from the US to bring our baby girl home. Pre Approval takes place on the US side while Family Court takes place on the Guatemalan side.

PGN
This is the where the Guatemalan goverment (PGN = Procuradoria General del Nacion - the governmental human rights entity in Guatemala) looks over all of our documents with a fine tooth comb.

Pink Slip
This means everything is pretty much finished and our US Embassy appointment has been assigned. This is when we schedule our trip to Guatemala to pick her up!

Embassy Appointment in Guatemala
This is the final step before we can bring her home!

Home!

Hope that helps everyone understand the steps from here on out a little better. :)

Fingerprinting Complete

We did get our fingerprinting completed Tuesday morning in Lubbock. It all went fine so I guess we worried about not having an appointment for nothing. Glad to have it finished! Now we're waiting on them (USCIS) to complete our paperwork and issue us a 171H document.

Fingerprinting Closed

We showed up to get our fingerprinting done with Immigration Services on Saturday and they were closed for Labor Day. Sooo frustrating! Shannon had even called ahead to make sure they'd be open but all the National Customer Service center could tell us is that they "assumed" they would be. We're getting ready to leave to go back this morning and try again.

More Fingerprinting

We received our notification from Immigration Services this week about our fingerprinting appointment. We were expecting to be given a specific appointment time and place for our fingerprinting because that is the norm. Instead we received a document that said we could be fingerprinted upon receipt of that notice. Since this wasn't normal for Immigration Services we tried to call to ask some questions only to find that none of the local offices (Ft. Worth, Dallas, Lubbock) list their phone numbers ANYWHERE. Shannon searched hard to find their phone numbers but couldn't. She contacted their national customer service number but they were not able to help much, didn't know why we weren't given a specific appointment, and couldn't give Shannon any of the local office phone numbers. Soooo, we were given an email address that we could contact with specific questions. We finally received a reply after a couple of days confirming that we could pick our time and location for the fingerprinting. Very confusing and unfortunate that the government doesn't have enough money to give these local offices telephones! We're planning to be fingerprinted on Saturday while we're in the Lubbock area for Labor Day.

We're On The Waiting List!!!

We just received an email letting us know that our dossier has been submitted to Guatemala and we are now officially on the waiting list for a baby girl!!! It will take approximately 10 weeks for us to get a referral (match up with a baby). We'll post more later about the process from this point forward. How exciting!! It's hard to believe we've been working towards this point for 2 months already!

Immigration Mistake...Maybe

We may have made a mistake on our I-600A form that we submitted back in June to immigration. We're sending a letter and an email to them to try and get it corrected if it is an issue. The mistake involves one place on the form where it said to include Shannon's maiden name, which we did, but we didn't put "Hedges" after her maiden name. We're hoping it either won't be a big deal or that they will fix it for us. But it's the goverment, so we're kinda worried.

First Grant Application

We applied for our first grant tonight from the National Adoption Foundation. They only meet once a quarter to award grants so we won't hear anything back from them until October.

Pictures for our Dossier

Here are the pics we took for our dossier. We had to provide 3 of the inside of our home, 2 of the outside (posted previously), 1 of the 2 of us, and 2 of us with Joel. The last 2 are self-portraits using a remote control for the camera. :) Joel smiles better when no one is behind the camera!

Dossier Send Off!

Yeeeehaaaaw! We received our authenticated documents back from the Guatemalan Consulate in Houston yesterday and sent everything off to our agency to be compiled into our dossier. Once they finish, we'll go on the waiting list for a baby girl and the dossier will be sent to Guatemala to be translated. We ended up with 101 pages of paperwork!

Dossier Preparation

After a boil water notice from our city on Thursday night and a weekend of flood threats to our home from the creek across the street, we sat down tonight to wrap up some preparation for our dossier. The potential flooding kept us both up alot of the night so we're really tired. Thankfully, our home and neighborhood did not flood. We expect to receive our authenticated documents back from the Guatemalan Consulate in Houston tomorrow morning. We took pictures of the inside of our home and sent them off to Wal-Mart for processing (we'll pick them up tomorrow). We filled out the I-600 form and a DNA payment form for Guatemala to do DNA testing on our baby and birth mother. We wrote out the check for our second payment to our agency. We should be able to ship everything off tomorrow afternoon to Linda in Missouri, our agency's dossier coordinator, who will put everything together into a dossier and submit it to Guatemala. Then we go on the waiting list for a baby girl!!!

Friends Adopting

We recently learned that another family from our church has decided to adopt from Kahzakstan! How exciting! Shannon spent some time talking with them yesterday about paperwork. It's neat to have another family in our church going through the adoption process.

Certified...Now Authenticating

We received our certified documents back from Austin yesterday. We turned around and sent them to the Guatemalan Consulate in Houston for authentication. We were going to use a courier to walk our documents through the process in Houston but Shannon called the Consulate and they said they would only take 2 days to process our documents, same as hiring a courier. So, we decided to just mail everything straight to the Consulate. We're hoping to get our authenticated documents back next Tuesday. We're getting close to having our dossier complete!