Christmas Picture

Merry Christmas a few days late, everyone! We took this on Christmas morning at my parent's house. Ali was feeling a little under the weather, but we managed to get a smiling picture. Christmas was a fun day for us, and crazy. Two other families with young toddlers joined my parents and my brother and sister-in-law for a wild day. I love celebrating with a crowd, though!

I've been dreaming a lot lately about what it will be like when we are a family of four...who knows, maybe next year our Christmas picture will have another child in it! I am content, though, in the waiting. It's been so much work just to get to this point, but I'm so grateful to God that He has given me peace in the waiting. I'm sure a lot of that has to do with your prayers for us. I know He will provide the resources to complete this adoption, the wisdom we need to raise our two kids (maybe more in the future), and His never-ending presence. I was reminded again this Christmas that Jesus is Emmanuel: God-with-us. I know that's "old news" to so many of us, myself included, but wow...I mean, Jesus is with me all the time, wherever I go. So I remind myself to praise Him, and to make my praise glorious for Him, dancing, singing, leaping, praising all day long!

URGH...Revisions Necessary

Hello All who are patiently waiting with us in this adoption process. I went out to check the mail this afternoon on this blissfully warm day in December and saw an envelope from none other than USCIS. Unfortunately, I saw yellow paper peeking at me from the clear little slot in the envelope where our address was. Surely, I thought to myself, they do not put our approval on such paper. I was right. We have officially been told by USCIS that our homestudy lacks one thing: our homestudy preparer's signature with a declaration that she wrote all the information in our homestudy "under penalty of perjury under United States law that..." and then it lists a bunch of fancy language that has to be written verbatim into our homestudy (which, by the way, is already in our homestudy, just not all fancy and at the end with the signature). Craziness.

But the good news is that our file is actually in the process of being reviewed by USCIS. This change shouldn't take too long, and we'll hopefully get our US approval very soon!