We received our updated I-171H today in the mail! Woohoo!!!!
For those not well versed in international adoption lingo - that is the approval letter from the U.S. government that allows us to bring an orphan into the country. This approval is something that you must have BEFORE you send off your dossier to the country you are adopting from - in our case Ethiopia.
We, of course, had this document already - however, our original approval (and homestudy which the approval is based off of) had an age range of 12-24 months - which in the world of adoption and delays - is a razor thin margin.
Our thoughts when starting the adoption process was to request toddler age so that the age difference between our youngest (Joel - 4) and the newbie wouldn't be far since our three kids are close in age. However, after realizing that it just doesn't matter - and we'd rather be referred a younger child than for a child to wait around to age into our minimum age bracket - we told our agency we were open to a younger age. Then came baby H's referral, all 4 1/2 months of her. Oh the sweetness! And our answer was Yes, Yes, Yes!!!!
However, accepting a younger age than our original approval left me doing a bit more paperwork. We had to have our Social Worker update & amend our homestudy (even though we were going from 12-24 mo. to 0-24 mo.) and then we had to send the old homestudy, new amended homestudy, letter of explanation & form to change our I-600 approval to USCIS. Whew.
Surprisingly it only took 2 weeks for them to process, which is exceptionally fast!
So now we have the paper to prove that we can officially bring a child Baby H's age into the U.S.
Yay!!!
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