So today I go to the mailbox and I’m not going to lie, I’m always somewhat hopeful when I walk up to it. Today though, I was thinking to myself, “It’s way too early to get our fingerprinting appointment, so don’t get excited Amy.” But much to my surprise there is an envelope in there from USCIS! How exciting, right?!
Ummmm no.
The letter states: “This is just to confirm we have received your I-600A and we are processing it.”
Big. Major. Bummer.
I DO NOT like getting punked by USCIS, but I’m staying hopeful that we’ll have our appointment by the end of the week.
And since we haven’t done this in awhile, and I have nothing else adoption related to talk about other than my USCIS Ashton Kutcher situation, I’m going to continue with “Adoption Q&A with Amy Post.” These are just some of the questions I’ve been hearing a lot of over the last 3 ½ months or so.
Question: Do you get to pick out your child?
Answer: No, I’m a believer that God already knows who our child is, but how he’s going to get that baby to us is by way of a referral. A referral is a photo and information of our child that we are matched with based on the requests we submitted to our agency. We should receive our referral 6-10 months after we get on the waiting list. (Which will be soon, hopefully!) Our requests are for a healthy child between 0-12 months old.
Question: Have you picked out any names?
Answer: No. Until we get our referral, we don’t feel comfortable picking out a name. I truly believe we need to know what his Ethiopian name is first. The reason for this is that we do truly want to incorporate our child’s culture into his life here in America, so if his name is something that will be accepted in the American school systems, then we will very likely keep it. However, if it is something that could potentially cause problems for friends and teachers to pronounce, then we will likely change it.
Question: Are you going to have a baby shower?
Answer: I’m very surprised at how much people care about this right now, but yes, I do believe someone will throw a baby shower. Again, this won’t happen until we have our referral and find out for sure that we aren’t having a little girl. I will admit, it will be strange not to be pregnant for my own shower, but hey maybe we’ll do mimosas! Cheers to being psychologically pregnant instead of physically! (FYI – Just because I don’t know when this shower will be, it doesn’t mean that I haven’t gone online and played around with baby registries though. Hey, I gotta do something to pass the time, right?!)
Question: So, how much longer do you have?
Answer: This is the question I’m sure I’m going to get VERY sick of hearing. From now, I’m hopeful we only have about 12 months left. Keep the prayers coming our way!
