We would appreciate your prayers.

Late last week we were talking with our neighbors in adoption and discovered that they had been instructed to prepare a document that we hadn't heard of. It involved an amendment to their homestudy, called the I-600 Supplement 1 form, for their son who is over 18. Our oldest turned 18 in April, so we began to look into it.

The last few days have been full of long email and even phone conversations as we have tackled this new task of trying to complete forms in a few weeks that usually take a few months.  If we had known about it while in the States, we could have completed it easily.  From here, it is a bit more complicated. I really have appreciated my oldest son and my father who have taken my very detailed and long instructions of what needs to be done and run with their portion of it.

Here is what needs to happen:

Our social worker needs to complete an amendment to her original Homestudy, noting that our oldest son is now considered an adult. In order to do this, she needed him to get a fingerprint check through the FBI. (Oddly enough, he already has his fingerprints in process at the FBI for his mission Visa, but they are buried in the channel and unavailable. Luckily, his other forms and clearances from the previous Homestudy were still adequate and if not, at least his medical had been redone recently for his mission and we could have new forms signed for that part.)  So, our son got his fingerprints taken on Tuesday morning, had results Tuesday afternoon, and the social worker (who just happens to be in Germany!) began the amendment.

Being in Germany complicates things because her amendment needs to be notarized. She made an appointment with the Consulate in Frankfurt to see if she could get this accomplished. When the amendment is complete, she will scan and email it to the lawyer for our adoption agency who will create a document stating that the agency has completed oversight for the amendment, and both the amendment (from Germany) and the document from the lawyer will be mailed to our son.  (I am slow in getting this post out and want to give an update on how this went. Our social worker's fiancé, who she was visiting in Germany, worked until midnight Wednesday evening, took a short nap and then drove her to Frankfurt. It was a round trip journey of about 350 miles.  After they returned, he took another short nap and went back to work at 3pm. In the words of our social worker, "He was the real hero in all of this!")

Meanwhile, Ben and I needed to print three forms, fill them out, scan and email them various places, and then FedEx them to our son.  Thankfully our friends who are senior missionaries let us come over to their apartment and use their computer/scanner/printer.  This relieved the complication of trying to do this at a foreign Internet cafe or something.  Our hotel front desk crew helped us line up a courier for FedEx, which worked out perfectly.  It cost us 1/5 the price to send the documents home as it did for us to send documents to Ukraine in April.  Sure, there were 3x as many pages in April, but I cannot believe that was the whole story!  Documents are currently in transit -- France, now Tennessee, and Monday morning they will be at our house.

Our son will fill out and copy a number o' things, get a money order made for yet another set of fingerprints, send a stack of docs overnight to USCIS, and wait for their reply. Our adoption agency head hopes that she can get them to email a copy of the reply so we don't have to wait on the mail.  Once he hears from them, he can go into the local USCIS fingerprinting office and get documented with them. I don't know how long it will take them to process this portion.

On Thursday our son should receive the update Homestudy in the mail.  By then he should have received a form from our adoption agency witnessing that they oversaw the update and that it met Hague standards.  He will add those two things to the stack of documents we sent via FedEx, and he can then send in a request for USCIS to process our new approval.

Approval can take a long while, but is sometimes just red-tape.  Our agency is hoping we can get things expedited and that they will send approval quickly so it can be sent to us in Ukraine.  We have to have the original document by the time we reach Kiev and are ready to get our daughter's exit Visa. If we don't have the document confirming approval, we will have custody of our daughter but not be allowed to bring her home until the document clears and is in our hands.

Hence the harried late-night emails to communicate with everyone in different time zones.

We would appreciate your prayers in this complicated endeavor. I feel like it will be all right, and our Father in Heaven has already brought forth some wonderful miracles for us to be this far into the process. He can do all things that are necessary.  We continue to trust.