It's Here! It's Here!

We received our I-171H in the mail today! This form is USCIS (immigration) giving us approval to adopt from South Korea. It's the last piece of paperwork we needed before our agency can send our paperwork to Korea. Getting it today was a big surprise for us! When we sent in our USCIS application last March they sent us a letter saying that once they received our home study it could take 60 days to get the approval letter and to not contact them to find out your status until after that time. So our home study agency finally sent us our finalized home study last week. We sent it to USCIS and it got there on Thursday. While I was hoping (and praying) that our approval would take less thank 60 days, getting it in 6 days was a wonderful surprise. So hopefully when our agency gets it tomorrow they'll let us know what the next steps are and how long it will be until they can send our paperwork it all to Korea.

On a frustrating note (there is always something frustrating, isn't there) our home study agency is located in Austin and sent us our home study last Tuesday. We received it Wednesday. They also sent our adoption agency their copy and the agency still hasn't received it. It's been 8 days - they should have gotten it by now. Our agency is located in New York City, and I have noticed that the mail we've sent them takes a long time to get there - but never this long. We weren't too worried about it and just figured if it didn't get there by Friday our agency would send another one. Since we were waiting on immigration approval anyway, there was no rush. But now that we got the immigration approval, we want that home study to get there ASAP. I'm tempted to have our home study agency send an extra copy to us (since it only takes one day) and we'll pay to have it sent in a day or two. I'm really praying it gets there tomorrow so we don't have to worry about doing that.