Well okay. Now our adoption is officially a God-Sized task! I guess in some ways it has been from day one, but now it officially feels that way. For some reason I am more at peace with it being that way than just something I think we can do.
On Friday we were told that the home study we sent with our I-800a does not meet the standards required for a Hague Convention adoption. This is different from the information we got last Tuesday from our home study provider, but I guess we didn’t talk to the right person. Anyway, the home study provider is being very helpful in getting the home study rewritten to meet Hague standards. We are praying that this doesn’t hold us up too much.
We also discovered that in order to be eligible to adopt from a Hague Convention country we have to have 10 hours worth of training from an accredited Hague training source. Fortunately, this training is available online, so a few clicks and $100 dollars later, Mary Ann are cramming like we are in college. Were hoping to be finished with all of the training by the end of the weekend so that our home study agency can sign us off on the training for the I-800 filing.
So here is the big news. Talking with the adoption agency that is handling our post-adoption reporting, they have had clients that filed their I-800a and I-800 at the same time. They have also had clients that needed to do this and couldn’t. So the new God-Sized task is that we will be able to talk to someone at the National Benefits Center, which handles the processing of the I-800a and the I-800 applications, who will allow us to go ahead and file our I-800 with our updated home study. This could potentially be the time saving element that we need to ensure that we don’t lose the referral. We could potentially be approved by the end of April if we can find someone at the NBC who is willing to help us.
So here is the new prayer list:
- Pray that we get in touch with someone at the National Benefits Center who is willing to help us expedite our applications, allowing us to file them together.
- Pray that we get our home study updated quickly during this next week.
- Continue to pray that the ICBF won’t give up on us.
- Pray that we can continue to just trust God in this process and that the day will come when we will give Him the glory for the great things He has done!
Thank you for all of your prayers and support.
Awaiting His Coming,
Patrick & Mary Ann Mulvehill
