Homestudy is complete!

We are approved for adoption pending those pesky fingerprints getting cleared! Erica came to our house on Monday (4/27) for another 5+ hours of questions regarding our marriage, parenting styles, and strategies to handle attachment issues and transcultural parenting. Then there was a brief tour of our house. It was so brief that we were really glad we didn't spend extra time deep cleaning our home! Apparently everything looked good and we said the right answers because Erica said she would approve us - HOORAY! We just can't be officially approved and move forward until the Adam Walsh Background Study is done.

The agency let us start making some phone calls last week to investigate why it has taken 4 months to process this background check. To make a long story short, after a bunch of phone calls and dead ends, MN DHS is now re-submitting the paperwork to IA and we are hopeful that everything should be good to go by the end of next week. If you want more of the details on this part of our journey, feel free to call us. We'd love to fill you in!

So we are in limbo right now, feeling good about completing the homestudy but frustrated about not getting the Adam Walsh Study cleared. Erica suggested we go out and celebrate being done with the home visits, but we decided to wait until we are officially done with everything on our end and just waiting for that referral!

Oh, and there's also one more set of paperwork to complete for Immigration Services so we can legally bring our child home. That also requires fingerprints but is processed in an entirely different way, so we are hopeful that we won't have any delays there, too. This paperwork comes with an expiration date (once you are approved you have 1 year to bring your child home or else you have to update the paperwork) so we are waiting to get the go ahead from the Korea program coordinator before we start that process.

We will let you know as soon as we hear about the Adam Walsh Background Study... hopefully sooner rather than later! Thanks for all of your support in this long but exciting process!