Still waiting.....

Early this morning I had read on our yahoo support group that five kids were finalized. Congratulations to the two families that received word that their children are now officially theirs. They get to move into the next stage of waiting for the children's Liberian passports and the US visas. I was a little disappointed that we weren't one of these families but I am very thankful that we are still waiting. One family that was waiting for the finalization call got word that their child had been removed from the orphanage by his parent. The Avella family has been waiting for along time for adoption. Please pray for them as they struggle to deal with this loss.

We finished the paperwork, again....

I finished the paperwork for updating our homestudy and mailed it off yesterday. I did get the taxes printed off, thankfully, and was able to get them sent off. Now we have to get our yellow fever shots and our Liberian passports so we can travel. The shots are needed to get back into the USA not to enter Liberia.

We are in a group of families waiting to hear about the finalization of 15 kids. These kids' paperwork is with a Liberian judge who is sitting on the cases. The last I heard from Rachel at AOH was that they should be finalized any day. Yesterday another family in the same boat spoke with Rachel and was told that five kids' had their adoption finalized. I haven't heard who the fortunate families are but I'll post when I know more.

TAXES!! Arghh!

You probably all have some tax frustration you can relate to. I currently have two issues with taxes.... first, to get the homestudy updated I needed a copy of our most recent taxes. Second, I need to do this year's taxes. I've been thwarted with both. Since we've moved, yep, you guessed it, I can't find last year's taxes. Oh, I have them in a data format which this year's software can't convert into print format but no paper copies. So, I figured I'd just do this year's taxes and send them. Ha! Del's company overtaxed his social security and medicare and my tax software doesn't recommend proceeding until we've gotten a refund from his company with a corrected W-2. Good news and bad news... we should get a nice chunck of money back but not in time for my self-imposed deadline to get the homestudy update completed.

However, God is good and after unpacking another 8 boxes yesterday, I did find last year's tax software. Now I'm crossing my fingers that I can install the software, access the tax data file and be able to print last year's taxes.

Updated homestudy required for Florida

It is a good thing we had to update our homestudy for FL because when I was copying all official documents, I learned that our certified copy of our marriage certificate was missing. Since we'll need this when we travel, I have ordered new ones. They should be arriving here this week and then we'll have our portion of the paperwork done for the updated homestudy. Then we can sit and wait some more.

I spoke with Rachel at AOH and found out that our kids are still at the orphanage. It has been so long that I was beginning to fear that their dad came back to get them since the Liberian deputy minister issued some bad press about adoptions and child trafficking in January. However, they are still waiting for us. We sent a card along with another family so that the kids know we haven't forgotten about them.

Until next time....