USCIS Paperwork....CHECK!

So yesterday we attended the trans-racial training that is required for all families adopting from another race. It was very eye opening and the excercises really made us think about how we are going to incorporate Ethiopian culture into our family and expose our little girl and our other children to people of other colors. We really live in a "white world" here in West Michigan-our schools are predominately white, our church is predominately white, our doctors/dentists are predominately white, our friends are predominately white and the list goes on. We really never thought about it before, because we feel comfortable in our surroundings. Maybe she won't feel as comfortable standing out. We are now brainstorming on how we can become a more multi-cultural family-for all of our benefit, not just our ET girl. There were two adult speakers-one was an African American lady adopted into an all white dutch family back in 1968 when it was illegal to adopt an African American child. (Can you even believe that was a law!?) The other was a Korean lady adopted into an all white dutch family...surprise! Their stories were so inspiring and taught us some critical things. It was great to get a broadened perspective from people who have "lived" it. The common thread was the pure greatfulness these women felt towards their adoptive Mom & Dad-especially when they took a lot of flack for it.

At the same time, we were able to bring home our completed homestudy last night. We read it as soon as we got home and it was literally like a flashback of our entire lives! It was as if we were reading about someone else(-: Today, I anxiously drove over to the fed-x store and overnighted the homestudy along with all supporting documentation to the US Citizenship & Immigration offices. Now, we will wait. We've been told it will be a few weeks before we get acknowledgement of our paperwork, a few more weeks before we get a fingerprinting appt, and another month before we receive our actual approval. Once we get our "golden ticket" (aka: orphan visa approval I-171-H) we will be onto the most daunting portion of the paperwork- our dossier!