Adoption Update and Superhero in finals!

Hello,

I hope everyone is having a wonderful summer. We have a few more weeks although some schools here started back today! I am not quite ready so a few more weeks are good for us!!

My new favorite pic of Kwame I edited after taking a free online photo editing class!!


After consulting with our local USCIS office and adoption agency, we have decided to file our I600 here in Arizona. For Ghana adoptions, most people choose to take a trip to Ghana to file it there because it usually goes faster. Due to a recent change in that the approval can now be sent via email instead of snail mail, processing times are going faster and families are now considering filing stateside instead of traveling.

I am very hopeful that our timeline will be very similar to if we had traveled to Ghana. I plan to file it this week in our local office. I am just waiting to get the scanned copy or our adoption decree and to hear back from the office letting me know when I can come in.

I have mixed feelings about filing stateside. I really was looking forward to going back to Ghana. I wanted to see our son and I also wanted to get to be in Ghana for a week. I miss Ghana. I really do and if I had needed to go back, I was excited to go. Getting to be in Ghana with our son would have been wonderful. I know I will always miss that I did not have the opportunity to know him and interact with him in Ghana- to see how he was and to experience his birth country with him.

It will be easier financially to file here as a trip to Ghana to file would have cost about $2500 and would have been very hard on Selina and Cater to have me leave. Especially Selina. We think she would have a setback in her attaching if I left her for a week. She is really a mommy's girl and we are so happy with how she is doing in her attachment that it would be hard to risk hurting that at this point.

Instead, our plan is to have TR and Kman go to pick Kwame up and bring him home when his paperwork is all done. TR has not been to Ghana and we feel it is important he experience being in his children's birth country. If we can work it out, we plan to have Kman go.

Since the day he found out last year that we were adopting a girl first and planned to go back for his brother, Kman has wanted to go along to get him. I think it will be such a wonderful experience for these brothers to be together from the beginning and for Kman to know what Kwame's life was like in Ghana. I think it is important for them to travel here together and for them to walk off the plane as Kwame enters his new life with his brother by his side to encourage him and be there for him. Kman is the kind of boy that will be a great support and friend to his brother.

Right now the "wild card" in the adoption is the passport. Ghana passports are coming our really slow right now and are really unpredictable. They don't come out in the order they go in and seem to get lost along the way. His passport was submitted and came out in May but was missing a signature so it had to be turned back in. From that point, it went into an abyss and was never to be heard from again so it was filed all over again in June. So basically this passport could come in tomorrow or in months.

So for our timeline- I will file the I600 here this week, hopefully it will be approved and sent off to the National Visa Center within one week. It will be processed there and hopefully sent off to Ghana a week or so after that. I would feel blessed if we had I600 approval and the paperwork was back in Ghana in one month. That is about how long it would have taken for me to go to Ghana and file and get the approval.

Once we have that approval AND the passport, we can plan to go to Ghana about three weeks to a month later to bring Kwame home. So I think a best case scenerio if I try to protect my heart is to hope to have Kwame home by sometime in October at the latest. If it is before then, I am happy and thankful.

I never thought when starting this process, that I would be thankful for him to come home in October. I thought he would have been home by now but it is what it is and I am focused on how blessed we are to have him as our son.

At this time, we are working on saving for our airfare. With two adoptions in two years and looking at traveling at the most expensive time of the year to fly to Ghana, we find ourselves short on travel funds. For those that have not traveled to Africa, we are looking at ticket prices of between $2000 and $2500 per ticket for TR and Kman and about $1500 for Kwame to come home one way.


So on that note...


What started out as a fun thing for the kids to do this summer has kind of blossomed into an opportunity for us to win some money in a radio station contest.

A local rock radio station is having a Top Pet contest and we entered our guinea pig Batman. We found out today that he is in the finals. The contest started off with 900 pets entered and Batman is now in the final 50 pets. If he wins, we get $1500 which would basically cover our ticket to get Kwame home or a good portion of TR or Kman's airfare. It would relieve some pressure on us financially.

In order to win, Batman must have the most votes. You can vote one time per computer and email a day. So each computer can place a vote each day as long as the email entered is different for each computer.

Please click here and vote for Batman. Once on the page, Click on the link below Batman that says "Vote For Me" and then enter your email. It takes less than one minute. If you can do that everyday this week (Contest ends August 3) it would be awesome. If you would pass this on to your contacts and ask them to vote, it would be appreciated. You never know who will hear about Batman and run with this. I had a friend of my neighbor hear about Batman and read our story and she has passed this on a few times on her FB and Twitter accounts. She has been so sweet and she doesn't even know us!

Here is the http addy: http://www.mix969.com/pages/arizonas-top-pet/vote-entrants.php

It seems kind of silly to me that there is a company out there willing to give away $1500 for having a "Top Pet" but hey, if they are willing to do it and I just have to pass on the word and click to win- I figure that I have nothing to lose and a lot to gain. I never would have thought in a million years that our little black piggie with the wild hair could possibly help us raise adoption funds. I think it is pretty cool that he has the chance to help bring a family member home. What an awesome accomplishment for a guinea pig!! :-) Thank you for all those that have voted, I have received some really thoughtful emails and comments and it is so appreciated.

I have several updates to post but my laptop harddrive has died and I am waiting for a new one (thankfully it was under warrenty). I look forward to catching up on that as I have a few cool pictures I have taken recently that I look foward to sharing!

I hope you all are enjoying your summer and get to have some more fun before it is over!!