China trip... Home Study... and "oh dear we need a lot of money right now"

My visit to China was amazing.  It was a non-stop week that had us in three orphanages, traveling thousands of miles on planes and hundreds of miles on a bus, and sleeping in four different hotel rooms.  I was exhausted by the end but the Lord gave me strength to stick with it and keep going.  I was with the BEST group of people.  We spent 7 days in close proximity, attached at the hip, and everything still went beautifully.  I don't know the exact number, but we saw close to 200 kids in Guangdong Province.  This trip had nothing to do with my adoption, but was with a volunteer group affiliated with our adoption agency called (un)adopted.  I was VERY close to my Emma during parts of the trip!  I'll post more about my trip later!

We were supposed to have our home tour with our social worker on my Birthday just after I returned from China.  I felt bad that my family was at home getting the house ready without my help but there was just not any other way to do it.  Our SW ended up having to cancel on us last minute because she was having problems with her pregnancy (TWINS!) and we began to transition to our new SW.  My family had a very busy late March/early April schedule and we didn't get around to that visit until our Anniversary!  The visit went very well and the kids loved meeting Emily and showing her around the house.  "Oh, surely she won't go looking through our (messy) closets!"...  no, she wont but the KIDS will show her!  Haha

We've been gathering up the last of the paperwork she needs to finalize our home study and I think she has everything now.  I expect an update from her later today letting us know if anything is outstanding and hopefully including a copy of our home study to review.

Once we review and make the necessary corrections (there will be mistakes where the SW has misunderstood something we were trying to communicate, those are always in there), we will sign a statement saying that everything is accurate and it along with the other documents for our dossier will be sent off to be authenticated.


The finalization of home study accompanies our next agency payment of around $2600.

Our I800a paperwork will be sent in with a copy of our finalized home study and a fee of $890.

Sending out dossier to China will accompany the next agency payment of around $2600.

This is a lot of money that we're facing over the next few weeks but everything calms down after this until right before travel when we'll have our last agency payment due and will start booking flights/hotels and getting the funds together for food/sight seeing/orphanage donation and such.

Adoption is expensive.  I'll post later about a fund raiser we have coming up starting next week!