We received our completed homestudy in the mail yesterday which we will be able to use to send in our I800A form. YIPPEE! Something new we haven’t done already!
Our homestudy is about half an inch think. It has a ton of detailed information plus copies of many of the forms we have already filled out attached to it. I had no idea they actually mailed those forms in to anyone official - I thought they were just for informational purposes. Now I’m wondering if I should I have typed up answers??? Although I doubt it matters I am worried about every little step.
The I800A should take about 60-90 days to complete. We have to send in a check with it for about $700 – details in an older post (I have to reread the instructions). I will get the check and my plan is to have this back in the mail by Friday. So hopefully sometime in October/early November we will have approval to bring a child here.
Yesterday I paid the processing fee. Finally a bonus for applying so long ago. Our processing fee to the agency was only $4800. (They have raised their fee to $5400 since we applied). So we saved $600. Although it is hard to think that you saved money when you just paid almost $5000. If we end up finding a child through our agency’s WIC (Waiting International Children) program we get a $500 refund of that processing fee.
They are putting together the list of information we need for our Colombian Dossier, so we can start collecting it. (Dossier consists of a couple large 3 ring binders full of any and everything about us. Normally consists of things like, marriage certificate, birth certificate, physical exam forms, letters of reference, possibly bank account statements, physiological/personality test results, photos of your home and your family) Each country is different in what they require so I cannot start putting this together until I get the list. It takes most couples 2-3 months to gather the required information. I am hoping it will take us less time than that. As the wait time we are looking at is 12-18 months once our Dossier is accepted in Colombia. So once we complete the Dossier we need to have it translated and than sent on to Colombia. It is my understanding that Colombia may take a couple months to review and approve our dossier. So I guess I’m hoping within 6 months we will have approval and start our 12-18 month wait. I guess that’s what I’ll hope to get for Christmas this year. But that may still be a little quick. 
The little girl we inquired about earlier this week turned out not to have been a good match for us. She is in Ecuador which has a new adoption pilot program. In this program one parent can leave after 21 days but the other parent needs to stay in country for 8 full weeks. We MAY have been able to figure this out – but it would have been exteremely difficult to miss that much work. As we can’t run right back to work right when we get home. We need to take time off to be with our child to get them settled when we get home too. This little girl also had more special needs than we felt comfortable parenting. We wish her well and hope she will be matched and on her way to her forever family soon.
Our plan is to continue on the Colombian Adoption path. (Requesting 1-2 children 3 yrs or under – single child, twins, or siblings). We will continue to check our agency’s WIC list to see if any children on that would be a good match for us. If we find and are deemed a good match for a WIC kid we continue to adopt that specific child and our Colombian adoption is halted. If the child we find is Colombian it will go VERY fast as we will already have approval from Colombia and be all set. So we are talking about having our child home 3-4 months or less from when we first are matched. If the child(ren) isn’t Colombian it may take a bit longer as we would have to get I800A approval for that specific country and have our Dossier submitted to that country for approval.
