This is it...

I have been waiting for almost two years to write this post...

We are meeting our girl in one week!!!!!

Sometimes I can't believe it is actually happening. We got our phone call today that our encuentro (meeting) is set for next Friday. Our plan is to leave Monday, so we have a few days to adjust before we pick her up. Friday we will go to her orphanage, La Casa, and talk with her care takers before officially meeting her. Then she is ours! She will stay with us the whole trip. 

It has been a day of a lot of emotions for sure. We are so excited that the time has finally come, but it still seems surreal. After a year of seeing pictures we finally get to meet our girl in person, we finally get to be parents. Ahh, that is kind of scary too! But I know this is what God has called us to, and He will equip us for it. 

We are staying at the Hotel Zuetana in Bogota, and the owner is super sweet. She is even going to get some groceries for us before we get in! Our plan for communication is Skype (allyson.hamilton88), or an app called WhatsApp. If you download it we can text and send pictures through it. We will not be able to post pictures to the blog until our adoption is official at the end of our stay, but we will post updates. 

We also got our visas today, so there is nothing else we need to do (except finish packing). 

The official letter

One step closer! The official I800 letter!

The Power of Prayer

On Monday I petitioned everyone to pray that we would hear quickly about our I800 approval. We had been told she had just received our file, and would possibly review it by Thursday. Well God is bigger than men's timelines because we got an email Wednesday saying that our officer had approved the I800, and the letter was on its way to us!! Now we are one step closer. Here are the next couple steps in more detail. I am learning more about each step as we get there.

1. Our I800 approval is sent to the National Visa Center for processing.
2. I can call NVC on Wednesday to get our case number. Then I use the case number to file the DS-260, which is approved immediately.
3. A letter called an Article 5 gets sent to the ICBF in Colombia, and they will schedule our encuentro  date! (The official date that we will meet Brielle).
4. We will book round trip plane tickets because you must have a return ticket to get a visa.
5. Go to Atlanta and apply for our visas.
6. PACK, PACK, PACK!
7. Go to Colombia!

So our timeline is definitely getting shorter, and our agency has said this part moves pretty quickly. At this point weeks are feelings long to us because we are just ready to get our girl! Please be praying that all of these steps are completed quickly. This part that could take longer is the Article 5 getting sent to Colombia, and the meeting date set, so you can pray specifically about step 3. Your prayers are working, so thank you, thank you!

In the mean time it has been so fun for me to get ready for our little girl!

Moving forward...

We are in the final stages of paperwork now! It is hard to believe we are almost to travel time. Some days I feel like I don't even have enough time to prepare, other days I feel like time is moving so slowly. Someone compared it to their last month of pregnancy!

We submitted our acceptance letter for our referral, and our I800 just over a week ago. The I800 is the next important document that we need. It clears Brielle to become a legal citizen, and clears us to take financial responsibility for her. So now we wait again...we received a 'receipt' for the I800 last Thursday, June 26th. That basically told us they had received it, and it is now being processed. It can take 3-4 weeks, but we have heard that people are getting them back as quickly as two weeks. Please pray that we get ours quickly! This momma is tired of waiting on papers!

Our next step will be submitting our DS-260, which has to do with getting our visas. This should only take about three days to get cleared. Then we wait for our meeting date in Colombia, book our plane tickets, and get our final visas! Still a few steps, but we have heard this part of the process is moving quickly. We are praying we could meet our girl in early August!!!

My type A personality has already started a packing list, and my task this week is to do some major shopping! It is hard to know what to bring when you're leaving the country for two months. Luckily I am part of a Facebook and Yahoo Colombian adoption group, which has been a great help.

So for now please be in prayer that our I800 approval comes quickly!

It's here!

We have finally received our referral!!! We were hoping that it would come this week, and I received it Tuesday (I was actually in class). Needless to say I didn't absorb all of what the professor said that day. :)

This is an important document for lots of reasons, but the most exciting to us is that Brielle is now legally our child in Colombia!

Now that we have the referral we can move forward with the last few steps before we travel. It is so nice to finally make forward progress again. Now we send in our acceptance letter for the referral, and send our final documents into the USCIS. They will clear Brielle to immigrate, and then we can apply for our visas. The last step will be booking our flights!!!!

We are still hoping to travel mid-August, so please be praying that we get approval quickly front he USCIS. You're prayers have been so helpful throughout the process, and we are forever grateful to everyone that has supported us. What a great journey it has been! We are truly looking forward to the journey of parenthood.

A little bit of progress...

It's been awhile since we had anything to update, but we are finally making some forward progress! Last week we received some medical updates, pictures, and a new video. That is always the best part for us, getting to see our girl making progress. Today we received our official dossier approval! That means we have been approved by the Colombian government, and can be 'officially' referred to Brielle. They estimate that will happen in about a month, so hopefully by the end of May. That would be an awesome birthday gift for me!

After we receive our referral we have two more things we have to do before travel. One of them will be to get visas for us to travel. The other is get US customs and immigration approval for Brielle to come into the United States. They estimate that can take anywhere between 2-6 months. We are praying that it will come in two months (from the end of May) or sooner! We will go as soon as we can!

Please be praying for all the paperwork to continue to get approved quickly, and for continued improvement for Brielle's health. She is doing great, but we are ready to get her home!

Thanks for all your support and prayers!

The best news yet!

Well this past week has been a roller coaster in many ways. We traveled up to Virginia for me to take a Master's course at Liberty. We were able to see Scott's family, and stay with his brother and sister-in-law. We got to celebrate our niece's first birthday, and his grandma's 90th birthday. The course that I took was my first "live" counseling course. I had to be a counselor and client throughout the week, which was very emotionally draining. Wednesday and Thursday I was at the school for 13 hours total because we had to videotape counseling after class. I got home Thursday night only to find out that my hard drive was full, and none of the videos had recorded. We redid the the videos Friday, and I finally was done around 4:00pm. When I got home I got an email that said "Good news for the weekend!".

Our Colombian worker had been in Haiti all week, so I did not expect to hear from her. We were waiting to hear back from the orphanage about a letter of intent that we had submitted for a 2.5 year old girl. On Friday we found out we had been accepted!!! At this time we are not going to share lots of personal information about her because we are still working to get government clearance, etc. We are super excited though because we can really start making concrete plans. I can start on her nursery, and possibly sew her some clothes. All of the fun mommy stuff! :) We already have her first hair clip, made by my sweet friend Joy. Our timeline is not definite yet, but we hope to travel in 2014 to pick her up.

Other than our paperwork we still have a lot of fundraising to do, so we are still praying for the Lord's provision. We have been blessed by some donations in the past weeks, and picked up our sample shirts from Black Ink today. We will be taking orders this week, so I will put all the specifics about sizes and prices on the blog soon. We also hope to have our website up soon, and we will have online ordering available there.

Don't forget about our coffee fundraiser as well: Just Love Coffee

Thank you for all your support! Let's bring our little girl home!