That is a first, she really did call this morning. I am still in a fragile state. We got amazingly good news today. Great news today. Wonderful news today. Our case has been submitted to US Embassy. These are the final steps to bringing our girl home. I was about to call Holt (to confirm that there was no news) when I looked down and saw the email from them. I then proceeded to sob and sob and sob. I really needed this news.

Here is a kind of outline of the next steps.
First were are submitted to embassy. We are now waiting for Embassy clearance. They look at our case and try to determine if it’s a “clean adoption” e.g. nothing fishy is going on. This process can take 8 days or it can take 6 months. Our case is pretty straightforward and barring any unforeseen issues we will hopefully hear sooner as oppose to later. The average is a couple of weeks. Also about 60% of the time the Embassy will email us directly to let us know we have been cleared. I find this somewhat creepy, but okay.

If all goes well (and it never goes all well in adoption) Davy will be home in July or August. July is tricky because that is when Embassy staff take vacations so they are taking less appointments. Damn you Embassy staff and your vacations!!

Then we wait for dates….Holt likes to push the dates out a week or two because they take us in a group. Part of this is it makes the bureaucracy easier and part of this (most importantly) is so that Holt can arrange for us to meet Davy’s birth parent.

A huge factor in us choosing Holt was for the birth parent meeting. I think it might be the most important part of our adoption. Davy is going to have so many questions when she gets older and we want to be able to tell her as much about her life and birth family as possible. That is important stuff. It’s important enough to delay our forever with her by a week or two. I think she will understand.

So I want to thank everyone for all of their support and wonderful comments yesterday. I am feeling emotional. I can’t tell you how much it helped. We are very lucky people to have so many folks in our lives caring about us and this little girl, who I can’t wait to show off to the universe.