still on the paperwork

I haven't posted in a while, so I thought I'd use tonight to catch things up. We had our home study visits on February 22nd and March 8th. Our social worker Kristy remembers Damon from college - small world!! We are just waiting for the document to be drawn up. Once it is, we will send it to Cathy Harris for her approval. Then once she approves it, the home study goes to the US Citizenship and Immigration Service. Then hopefully we get our I-171H approval from the government in about 6 weeks. Then our paperwork goes to Ukraine to wait for a submission date!!!

We had our fingerprinting appointment on March 12th at USCIS. It was an interesting experience to say the least...Turns out that the appointment was scheduled for my first day at my new job!! I let work know, and they were very good about letting me off. I had to work late that night anyway, so it wasn't a big deal! Good thing because I didn't want to change the appointment!!! Anyway - we get to the federal building about 7:25a (our appointment was at 8:00a, and most of you know how compulsive I am about being on time), but we couldn't get into the building until 7:30a. I think everyone we were in line with outside was going to the social security office, but we got in before waiting too long.

Once inside the building we had to wait in another line until the doors opened at 8:00a. The line grew to about 20 people by the time we were able to get in and get a number. While we were waiting in line, a few employees came out to tell us that we might have to reschedule because their computers and phone lines weren't working!! "You must be kidding" I thought. Turns out that they could do the fingerprinting, but not issue green cards (not a big problem for us). A guy in the waiting room though started yelling and getting VERY upset about that, but the USCIS guy calmed him down somewhat.

I was the second person to be fingerprinted and Damon was third. The actual fingerprinting took about 5 minutes, and everyone in the office was nice. While I was sitting in the room waiting on Damon, a girl sat down next to me (I say girl, but I am sure she was about my age). She kept looking at me out of the corner of her eyes, so I figured that she wanted to say something to me. I smiled at her, and then she asked me "Where are you from?" At first I wasn't sure what she was asking, but then I remembered that I was in the USCIS office. I told here, "Here, the United States." She said "Oh, I thought you seemed very American. So what are you doing here?" (I don't know if "seeming American" is a complement or not ???) I told her that my husband and I were adopting a boy from Ukraine, and she told me that many countries had children who needed homes and that it was nice of us to help them out. I still wonder what country she thought I was from...

My new job is going well. I have been pretty overwhelmed, but I am getting things under control. It difficult to start a new job when you've been at the old one six years and you were comfortable there. It's even more difficult because there is no one there to train me or to tell me the correct way to do things!! So I am just trying to figure things out on my own. Each day it gets a little easier, so that's a good sign :)

Not much else going on with us. We are in the process of planning a garage sale to help fund the adoption, so I have to start getting things in place for that. A lot of people are donating items so hopefully with advertising we can get a lot of people out and raise some money!!