Third Home Study Update, Update

Whew! Well....that was close. Our current I-171h expires June 7, 2010. It's June 2! Last night I successfully got all the necessary information put together in a nice little package and overnighted it at lunch to an address in Texas. This is different than the last time, when we sent everything to the appropriate USCIS field office, which in our case is the Kansas City office. We will still have to go there to be fingerprinted I assume.

Anyway, the Texas location will forward all our information to Kansas City. I hope. It is truly a leap of faith that everything will work out....faith in our government. So far we've not had any problems. Fingers crossed.

I may have mentioned this, but all this is to update our I-171h form, the form that says we are eligible to adopt, and our fingerprints, which tell the authorities we are not any sort of criminals. In order to get the updated I-171h, we had to fill out a new and improved I-600A and attach all of the following:

• photocopies of our birth certificates

• photocopy of our marriage certificate

• original home study update (from November 2008)

• photocopy of previous home study (from 18 months earlier, in April 2007)

• a check for $830 ($670 I-600A filing fee and $80 each for fingerprinting)

• photocopy of current I-171H and current fingerprint expiration letter

• cover letter explaining we are submitting a "grandfathered" filing of the I-600A in order to update our I-171H

The updated home study will be sent to USCIS by our agency, CHI, once they get one more background check that they were still waiting on. Our social worker is in Ethiopia currently so this won't happen until she returns, in about two weeks.