fingerprint appointment

We received notice of our I800A fingerprint appointment today. Yay! We've been waiting about 2 weeks for this little piece of paper that gives us a date and time that we are to walk into the Office of Homeland Security in Charlotte for another round of fingerprinting. (We were already fingerprinted once in the State of North Carolina for our home study, but this is a national fingerprinting through the FBI database).

For the full story on our USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) process, you can check out this post.

After we get fingerprinted, we will be assigned an officer at the National Benefits Center (NBC) office of the USCIS in Missouri. This officer will process all the paperwork we sent in including our home study and the result of our fingerprints, and make sure that everything meets the requirements for adoption from a Hague country (which China is). They will then mail us the approval of the I800a which is the I-797. Can't wait until we get that!

We are going to try to walk in this week for fingerprints early, and praying that they will fingerprint us early with no issues. So excited for movement! But also know that we have another month long-ish wait for an approval after we get fingerprinted. It's hard to balance the process that feels like it takes forever and to celebrate the little steps in the process, all the while feeling so far from our baby girl and wishing I felt closer. But thankful that my ultimate trust is not in these processes, but in the One (Jesus) who

"is before all things and in him all things hold together."

(Colossians 1:17)