Boy, boy, boy, boy, boy, girl

That will be our family, by age, in another couple of months! We received a new referral for another sibling group of three children at the July consejo in Peru. It took a few weeks to get all their information translated, and birth certificates and passport photos sent to our agency in the US, but we can finally share that we are close to adopting!

There's no such thing as the final paperwork in an adoption. There is the last application you have to make before being allowed to travel to the other country and meet the children. That is now complete. Our packet for the I-800 application went in to the US immigration office last week. Now, the US officials review the materials and determine that the children are legally available for adoption, and that the parents were previously approved for children with these characteristics. After all the prior checks and reviews, this step is almost a formality, but it still takes 4 to 8 weeks.

The new timeline will probably be for travel sometime between the last week of September and the second week of November, for about a month within that window. Even though we are all "in school" now, we do plan to take Alex with us for the full trip. He really wants to go, and dropped out of a park district theater camp so he wouldn't leave them to recast a part. The later we leave, the more of the cross-country season he can get in, but it is likely he'll miss sectionals (and state, if his team were able to qualify). We will get his schoolwork to bring with us. He might also have some catching up to do over Thanksgiving break.

Andrew is living at home this semester, attending Parkland Community College. He is still pursuing the possibility of an internship with the Walt Disney company during an upcoming semester. He and Aaron will stay home and keep attending classes while we're in Peru. My department is willing to let me ask faculty colleagues to sub for me while I'm gone. Chrissy will take parental leave, and use up some saved sick days.

We don't know much about where we will be staying yet. The attorney in Lima is making those arrangements now. We will order airline tickets once we hear from USCIS, and hope to not have to pay last-minute prices. (We are looking into adoption fares, missionary fares, and other special deals.)

We will arrive in Lima, then leave quickly by plane to Andahuaylas, where the children are living in an orphanage run by a private foundation. The attorney and a social worker from the SNA (national adoption bureau) will come with us, as there is no permanent SNA office in this small city. We will meet the children and stay with them in a hotel for about a week. Then, the social worker will determine whether we have adequately bonded with the children, or if there is a need for more time, or if the children have some objection to the adoption. Likewise, officially we could pull out at that point if there were some information revealed that we did not know about the children. Obviously, we expect things to go just fine.

We will all go back to Lima and a judge there will complete the adoption. Ordinarily, the local judge would conduct the hearing, but again there is no full-time family court judge in Andahuaylas. At that point, the children will be legally ours. The next few weeks before we can return to the US will be spent getting them various medical exams, immunizations, and filling out documents to get their US passports issued. With the I-800 in place, the request is "pre-approved" but you still have to jump through some hoops. Once we have passports and visas in hand, we can book a return flight. We will have round-trip tickets for going there and back, but we will have to get one-way tickets for the children, and probably change our schedule so we can all be on the same flight. Thus, even once we are legally ready to come back, it may take a couple of days to get onto a flight.

While in Lima, we plan to visit with some missionary friends from our church. We've only met them once, because they left Champaign before we moved here, but they are doing great work among street teens and children in Lima. They have four young children and can give us a break from trying to speak Spanish or use translators all the time!

Our next post will probably happen when we get the I-800 approval. Thank you for your prayers, concern, and support through this process. It's been over two years, but there are still joyous moments ahead.