We're going to Vietnam!!!

The past two days have been crazy and full of emotions, both happy and sad. Friday I got up and checked my email, and my heart started pounding out of my chest when I saw an email from Hanoi Adoptions--nope, not that receipt email I've been missing, but the current holy grail of Vietnam adoption emails--the I600 approval! I was shocked, thrilled, panic-stricken, amazed; I really didn't expect to see this for another month or two. I'm sad though for my friends in the VN adoption community who have been waiting for their approvals alot longer than I have. I was hoping to see a whole slew of approvals when I got mine, but unfortunately that didn't happpen.

So I'm thinking, wow, I have alot to do, but surely it will be a couple of weeks before they can schedule the G&R ceremony. Wrong again! "Call your travel agent and see how soon he can get you there", says our caseworker later that day. Travel agent says, "How about next Saturday?"
"Holy shit!" says Sue.

On the other end of the emotion spectrum, I attended the wake and funeral of my dearest friend's mom who has been very ill for a long time. Such a nice lady--I spent countless hours at her house when Ronda and I were in high school, and I'm so sad for Ronda and her family. I hope her mom is in a better place where there's no more pain and suffering.

You need a visa to enter Vietnam, so this morning, before the funeral, I had to get all 7 of our visa applications filled out, photos attached, sent Don to the bank to get the cashier's check for the application fees, and got them all ready to go so Don could run them over to Dubuque to the Fedex office before they closed at 2pm. so they can be overnighted to the Vietnamese Consulate in San Francisco. We had to pay extra to have them expidited, the they should process them in 2 days, and overnight them back to us, so if all goes well, we should have our passports and visas back by Thurs. or Friday. I hope.

I got home from the funeral late this afternoon and started back in on the travel planning, and I get a call from MY mom. (She's 83 and had heart surgery last year) Not feeling well, but oh, I'll be alright. She didn't put up a fuss when I said she needed to go to the doctor, so I knew then that she was feeling REALLY bad. Of course, this was at 4pm on a Saturday. So, long story short, I ended up in the emergency room with her--she had a kidney infection and was dehydrated, so she needed some IV fluids and IV antibiotics. So I just got back from taking her home. Of course, the medic alert necklace that she is *supposed* to be wearing at home seems to have mysteriously disappeared. So I wasn't too keen on leaving her there by herself when she's sick without that necklace.

Tomorrow I get to attend a baby shower for my niece, Kelley. She's 26, but it seems like such a short time ago that *she* was just a baby. It seems so strange that she and I will both have new babies soon.

Now I have to get to bed. Lots to do tomorrow!

STILL no confirmation email from USCIS that they've received my I600!! I've seen reports over the past week from several people whose I600's arrived in HCMC after mine announcing they have received their confirmation emails, so of course this has me picturing my packet literally falling through a crack in someone's desk and laying unseen for eternity.

This makes me so furious that our baby has to lay in an orphanage for all these months because OUR government decided to change the process, seemingly on a whim, and without planning how their change would be implemented in order to avoid this mess. We adoptive parents are suffering, absolutely, but it's the children who are losing the most, and it's breaking my heart.

Woke up this morning to find new pictures of the sweetie in my email--that always makes for a great start to the day! She's getting so big and looks like she's getting ready to crawl soon. I want to scoop her up into my arms SOOO BAD! Looks like she got her hair trimmed too; her bangs are shorter.

Still no receipt email from USCIS; it's been over 2 weeks since Fedex tracking confirmed that my I600 was delivered to their HCMC office. Would it kill somebody there to pick the damn thing up and look at it??!! Arrgh!

Let's try this again...

Can't wait to put ribbons and bows in this hair!

Practice

Bear with me as I practice putting images on this blog. Here are some pics of the kids on our last trip to Disney World last September.

Trying to post pictures

We aren't allowed to post pictures publicly until after the Giving & Receiving ceremony in Vietnam, so I will only post some sneak previews here. I will need to work on the sizing/spacing issues, lol! But aren't those the most kissable little lips?

What's new?

Well, it's clear that I'm a horrible blogger. I'll try to do better, but no guarantees. Since I haven't posted since we got our referral, I will try to summarize what has happened with our adoption since then:

We were lucky enough to receive new pictures of our little sweetie right before Halloween when another adoptive parent with our agency went to our baby's orphanage and was able to see her and take lots of pictures. It was so wonderful to see all the pictures, but a little bit sad to see how much she changed in just one month, and realize how much of her little life we are missing.

We got a bunch of new pictures again in mid-December, this time from our agency. What a nice Christmas present that was!

We finally got the go-ahead from our agency to file our I600 on 1/9/08, so we completed our forms and overnight Fedexed them to our agency, and then they put them together with the baby's paperwork from the orphanage and sent the whole thing off to the USCIS office in HCMC where it arrived on 1/14/08. Now we are waiting for the email from USCIS to confirm receipt, and then we wait for approval. For those who might be reading this who are not familiar with the Vietnam international adoption process, basicially the I600 is a form that, together with several other documents, must be sent to the USCIS (US immigration) in order to receive an immigrant visa for our baby to enter the US. This used to be applied for in Vietnam AFTER the adoption took place, but they changed the process in October so that now adoptive parents must apply BEFORE traveling. This has caused delays in many of our adoptions as agencies and orphanages scrambled to figure out the new process, and now more delays as we wait for USCIS to process the applications and issue approvals.

So when will we travel? Good question. USCIS has stated that approvals will take no more than 60 days from receipt of applications; some have received approvals much more quickly, and others are approaching the 60-day mark with NO approval. We still haven't received our official "receipt" email, even though I know from Fedex tracking that our I600 arrived at their office on 1/14. So I'm *guessing* that, if all goes well, we should travel sometime between late Feb. and late March.