After I wrote yesterday's entry, referrals started to arrive in Europe!  To be clear, this batch will not include us, but it will include dear friends of ours who have walked this entire journey with us.  We can't wait to see the face of their little girl and share in their excitement!

And then. . . .we may be next to get our referral (which would be 2 - 4 weeks)!!!   Stay tuned. . .

Sharon

Swine Flu is apparently holding up referrals because China has stopped sending out referrals or Travel Approvals.  If they continue to match during this time - which is what they did during the SARS epidemic - we might be pleasantly surprised with a referral in June.  If they have totally stopped matching, we are proverbally dead in the water until the situation gets resolved and who knows how long that could take.  So we wait and continue to prepare for our little girl to come home.

On the good news front, all of our paperwork is updated and we are good to go!  We received something called our I171H yesterday which is our governernment's stamp of approval on our adoption.  This was a big relief to us because it was nearly denied!

Here's what happened:  Our former I171H was set to expire on May 5 and we knew we had to submit a new 1600 form before that date (remember that big hullaballo a few months ago of the I600 vs the I800?).  So we sent it in with a week to spare and the day before taking off on a short roadtrip (that would have taken us past the May 5 deadline) we received all of our paperwork back!  They said we hadn't included enough money to cover new fingerprinting and could not process it without that or verification that we were grandfathered in to the old I600 system.  Had this arrived the day following we would not have been able to resubmit and would have been in violation of "abandoning" our petition. This would have meant re-submitting under the I800 which would have meant re-doing our HomeStudy (which we had just done) and gathering way more documentation.  I nearly went into a panic . . .but for God! He had our backs and allowed it to arrive in time to make the necessary corrections.

By the way -- we did send in the extra $160 for fingerprinting even though we had already been fingerprinted in January and didn't need to go through that expense again. But this is the government and they kind of have us over a barrel so we forked over the money anyway. What can you do? 

So here we wait -- it's like we are circling in the air above China waiting to land to receive our referral and the pilot keeps saying, "We are sorry for the unknown delay.  Please stay seated and make yourselves as comfortable as possible. As soon as we have approval to land, we'll let you know." 

As soon as we know that we're out of the holding pattern -- we'll let you know :-)  Thanks for your prayers and your support! 

Sharon