A little lingo lesson

DISCLAIMER: Jim wants to make everyone aware that any of the "lame-ness" of this blog is totally MY doing, and he is in no way responsible. That said....


Looking at the adoption timeline probably means absolutely ZERO to people who have not spent the past year or two immersed in state department websites and other random cyber-locations that differ from the People.com of which I've grown so fond. Here's a little mini-lesson to help it all make sense:

CIS: This stands for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, more commonly referred to as U.S. Immigration

I-600A: This is a form for USCIS that allows for advance processing of classifying an orphan as an immediate relative. Essentially, it allows us to be cleared by immigration here without specific children assigned, so that when we receive a referral we can move forward immediately upon acceptance of that referral. In Ethiopia, we'll file the I-600 which specifies the actual children we are adopting.

Referral: We will be contacted by our placement agency, Wide Horizons for Children, when we are matched with children. Basically, we have to wait until we are next on the list for children within our request range. In our case, we are open to a sibling group of two or three children aged 5 and under. The tricky part is that the children would either have to be around a year younger than Tessa, our youngest, or the oldest sibling could have a birthday between Mark and Tessa with the other sibling(s) being younger than Tessa. We'll receive photographs, lab test results, measurements, and any additional medical and birth family information that's available. At that time we'll have, I believe, 10 days to have a physician review the records with us and accept the referral.

Home study: This consisted of a lot of paperwork, including elements such as an adoption education component, local police clearance, FBI fingerprint clearance, medical reports on the current members of our household, multiple interviews with our local social worker (from Lutheran Social Services of Illinois) and culminated with a 10 or so page paper outlining basically our whole life since birth and stating our social worker's approval of us as adoptive parents.

Dossier: This is the "final" packet of paperwork that gets sent to our agency and will be eventually forwarded to the Ethiopian government to move through the courts there once our referral is accepted.


Wow, are you totally jacked by all of this new-found information?!?! Don't worry, there's plenty more to come.....

Here we are!!!

For those of you that found our blog via the pathetic, year old Christmas card we sent this year, this is actually what the kids look like these days. The picture of the whole fam was taken at the North Pole, thanks to the Holiday Express at the Oswegoland Park District. The pictures of Mark (6/25/02) and Tessa (7/15/04) were taken when they sang at our church service a couple of weeks ago. We're really enjoying this holiday season and are very excited to see what new children 2008 brings our family as we wait for a referral from Ethiopia!!