Still Waiting

We are still waiting on our I-171H.  Our Social Worker has emailed the Memphis office and we were told that I will have correct two pieces of information.  They also said that our homestudy did not state that our house meets the state requirements for adoption.  Our homestudy social worker has to write an addendum to our homestudy and send it.  This will be the third overnighting fee to USCIS.  We overnighted our homestudy right after it was completed and then we found out that it was sent to the wrong office.  They claimed they sent it to the correct location, however the Memphis office never saw it.  Sooo...we overnighted another copy of the homestudy to the Memphis office only to find out now that we will have to overnight the addendum!! UGH!!  I expected to possibly have to correct information for my application, because another family in my church had to do the same thing.  I did not fill in the blank that I have 0 previous marriages.  I blame the set up of the application.  The other correction I am not sure what to do, hopefully my social worker will be able to tell me what to change. 
I have been obsessively reading blogs for the last several months.  I love the blogs that have the timelines for their adoptions.  However, now I have read a couple new blogs that have their submission date for this dossier as far off as October!! They sent their dossier to Ukraine in March!  We are sending our dossier in the next week as long as I can get to the State Department to get our Petition to Adoption and a copy other document apostilled.  I am completely distressed, because I was quite certain if we requested a submission date by June that we would have our submission date by October.  However, if the wait is 6 to 7 months out then we won't get to submit until January!!   Is that normal for the submission date to be that far out from the date that you request to submit?  I never noticed that much of a gap in other adoptions I have read.  Do they only take submissions at certain times of the year?  I haven't called my social worker to ask her about this yet, but will do that on Tuesday when they reopen.  I am so discouraged about this as I was quite certain we would get to travel this year.  I keep praying that it will all be in God's timing, but I am soo ready to be done with all of this. 

I've become a stalker!

I am stalking the mailman!  He is starting to get suspicious!  Maybe that will intimidate him into delivering our I-171H (USCIS approval). It has been just about a month since our fingerprint date, but I keep hoping it will come quickly!  I am ready to get moving to the next step...I have a spreadsheet and it has unchecked items.  Soo...I will continue to stalk the mailman! 

Fundraising

Jeff and I have been working like crazy to raise money for our adoption.  God has been blessing us with numerous opportunities to cater.  We had planned that this year all of our profit from our catering business will go toward the adoption rather than competing in BBQ contests.  We have so many jobs booked for May!! I have been looking at our known sales for this quarter and it will be FOUR times what is was last year at this time!!! Amazing!!  If all goes as planned, we will have completely covered all of our U.S. related expenses which is right around $11,000! While we still have another $25,000 to go after that, I never thought we would get this much raised!!!  If our third quarter from catering follows our second quarter in growth, we would pretty much have our adoption paid for!!  I am not going to count my chickens before they hatch!  But God has been good to us and I know he is going to provide the money from somewhere, whether that is from catering or another source I don't know! 
This week has been crazy busy! We had 7 catering jobs over a 4 day period on top of working our regular jobs. Today we had our yard sale and raised $284. Tonight we are selling bbq at a nice venue in Wartrace, TN.  We still have 10 more catering jobs this month.  People tend to wait till the last minute to book, so right now June only has 3 jobs on the books. If June turns out like May, I will be excited!

We are still waiting on our clearance from immigration. I can never remember the name of the document..other than 171 something.  Anyway...don't care what it is called, I just want it to get here!!
In three more weeks, we are going back to get our bloodwork redone because our caseworker doesn't want it to be out of the 6 months range when we can submit our dossier.  I am soo excited to have half my blood removed from my body AGAIN!!  NOT!! I hate having blood draw, because they can never get it from my arm and I either have to have taken from my hand (ouch) or they poke me two or three times and THEN take it out of my hand. (triple ouch)
Anyway, thank you to all who donated items to our yard sale.  We are having another one at the beginning of June if anyone else has items they want to get rid of!!  Please continue to keep us in your prayers...waiting is tough!!