I-600 Approval

We're one step closer to bringing our son home! On 1/11/2010 our I-600 was approved which means that Nicholas will be considered our relative as soon as he enters the country. The USCIS office now sends this approval to the National Visa Center who forwards it to the US Embassy in Seoul. There a visa will be issued once Nicholas's documents from the South Korean Ministry of Health have been processed (i.e. his passport and his permission to emigrate). So now we wait again...

Last Thursday we also received a revised version of one of the forms we had notarized in December and were asked to get that notarized ASAP. So, we once again called our friend Jean to get it notarized and put it into overnight mail on Friday. Unfortuately, I chose to use USPS because it was cheaper and would deliver on Saturday. What I failed to realize was that CHSFS doesn't have a Saturday delivery since no one is there to pick it up, and Monday was a mail holiday due to Martin Luther King Junior Day. So overnight mail turned into 3 day mail. Oh well, people tell me in the long run one or two days won't matter but right now I feel like every minute counts!

We talked to our country specialist at our agency to make sure she got the forms on Tuesday and to let her know that our I-600 was approved. She gave us the good news that everything should be done on our end since the I-600 was on its way to Korea. Then she told us the even better news that the Korean agency that we are working with, Social Welfare Society, is very efficient with their paperwork, so things should move quickly from here on out. In fact there's a family there right now that matched in October. So we could be receiving the travel call sooner rather than later! What wonderful, yet slightly overwhelming, news! I guess we'd better get to work on that nursery!