Saturday, February 27, 2010

HOME STUDY DONE!!

Can you believe it????

Just got the letter -- our homestudy is done and the I-600A application was submitted to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on February 25, 2010. Wow. For anyone who's never adopted, this is a really big deal. :)

And to make things even more splendid, we're basically done with the dossier. Just waiting on a couple of forms and then we're taking all the dossier paperwork to Ryan's work to get notarized. Then we send everything to the agency, and wait for the call from USCIS to get fingerprinted. Once the dossier is deemed "cool" by the Ethiopian government, we're officially on the waitlist for two siblings. Wow wow wow.

What still blows me away about this whole process is that our older child may already be alive now. He or she may even be up to 2 or 3 years old at this point. That creates a confusing mix of being excited knowing they already exist and fear of what they might be going through right now, which would be our concern with any adoption, international or domestic. I wish there were some way I could protect him or her with a magic safety bubble of love.

On a lighter note, we went out to Addis Red Sea the day before my birthday last week. It's a fantastic Ethiopian restaurant in the South End of Boston. http://www.addisredsea.com/ The smell of the spices wafting throughout the restaurant was, for lack of a more original word, intoxicating. It was a marvelous aroma that I enjoyed for the whole two hours we were there. It wasn't a scent that you "got used to" and then didn't notice. It lingered in a wonderful way that made me breathe deeper just to absorb more of it. Which, of course, got me thinking more about Ethiopian cooking. I'll be trying my hand at a couple of recipes tomorrow night... Luckily, we already are well stocked with Indian spices and have all the spices we need. (Indian grocery stores, by the way, are THE place to get spices. VERY inexpensive and you get a big bag. If you don't want a lot, you can always share with others and everyone saves money.)

So that's the news from here. Our latest "Adoptive Families" magazine (thanks Caitlin!) just arrived this morning too, so I'm going to go enjoy that now...

Woo-hoo!
~Katrina

1 comment:

InventingLiz said...

Congrats on almost waiting!

Do you know about the South End Food Emporium? Owned by Ethiopians, fresh injera every day and tons of spices! I've been going once a week for our supply of injera but haven't braved the spices yet - they are in little containers with Amharic labels, so I am going to need some help...