Gathering paperwork

We finallly finished our correspondence pre-adopt course last week! I really had to push Patrick to finish all the questions, but he did a wonderful job on the book report! Yes, we had to write a book report, although it was not as bad as you might think. In fact, I think we both learned a lot from the particular book "20 things adopted children wish their adoptive parents knew" or something like that.
When we sent our answers into the agency I reallly thought that would be the last obsticle to beginning our homestudy. We had completed our medical forms, our financial forms, and our personal references had sent in their letters. And we were working on our autobiographies.
And then, we got the dreaded note from the International coordinator. We are going to have to wait another 6-8 weeks to begin the homestudy portion. It turns out that because Patrick and I haven't lived in Oregon for 5 years, we need to have fingerprints taken for a state background check. Once the fingerprints get to the proper authorities, they take about 6-8 weeks to return the results. Everything is on hold until then. The real bummer is that it means that our dossier probably won't get sent to China for almost 5 more months. Argghhhh, the waiting! Once it is in China it will be at least 8 months before we are assigned a child and then another 4-8 weeks before we travel. So, we are really still looking at maybe 15 months from now. It really seems like way too long.
Back to the fingerprints....
This morning we went to the sheriff's office to have ours taken. They are now doing everything digitally. It is pretty cool. No more black ink, we just put our fingers on a scanner and the computer scanned them in. Then they were printed on the traditional cards and we have to snail mail them to our agency. You'd think with all this technology they could just transfer them electronically, but no way. Just to top that off, we will have to go back for more fingerprints in a few months when the INS needs them for our international petition. It's funny that the different offices cannot just share the information. But I guess that is nothing new.........

So here we are, only one small baby step farther than we were a month ago. It is a pretty slow process and we are only at the tip of the iceberg.