Surprise

Matthew checked the balance of the adoption fund this morning and discovered that we’d had an unexpected deposit show up last night. Praise God!

This allowed us to send in our documents to the local Immigration Office (now known as USCIS-U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) to secure our I-600A. This document will allow us to secure a visa for our children in Ethiopia once we arrive to pick them up.

Every Little Detail About Our Lives

Today was an exciting day for the Flippen’s! We had our Home Study Interviews this afternoon with Lutheran Social Services. Our social worker was great and we were very much at ease with her conducting the interviews. She asked all kinds of questions, from childhood to adulthood and everything in between and then some! She conducted individual interviews with Matthew and I that took awhile to complete. After our individual interviews, she conducted a joint interview and then interviewed the kids for a few minutes. We expect the paperwork to be completed in a couple of weeks and hope to have that ready for our dossier.

In the immediate future (1-2 weeks), we’re asking God to provide the funds that we will need to receive our completed Home Study documents to submit with our dossier, which is $2,200.

Speaking of our dossier, we’re getting closer to having everything that we need to complete it. It’s an extremely time-consuming process mostly because EVERYTHING has to be notarized. Every piece of paper requiring a signature, from a doctor to a bank teller has to be notarized AND that notary has to have a commission that doesn’t expire within the next year. Get the picture?? Very detailed and complicated work!

We expect to have all of the documents necessary to submit our dossier to CWA in the next 2-3 weeks, assuming we receive the funds needed to complete the Home Study and get that released to us. When it’s ready to be mailed, we’ll need to submit $13,500 to send it off to Ethiopia.

A breakdown of the $13,500 and where that will be distributed is as follows:$2,500 – second half of the CWA Agency fee$7,000 - International fee (Ethiopian Government)for a child age 0-24 months$4,000 – International fee (Ethiopian Government) for a child age 25+ months

These amounts are due at submission of our dossier.Keep us in your prayers as we continue to move through this process.

Heather