A mixed bag

June 9, 2010

Exciting day - for both good and bad reasons. Lets start with the good news...

Today our entire dossier (minus the I800A/I797C we are waiting on from USCIS) arrived at our agency. It will now undergo a series of multiple reviews to make sure everything is in perfect order. Here's hoping I didn't make some crazy mistake somewhere down along the line... I'll breathe a lot easier once I get confirmation from them that everything looks good. Its quite a milestone to send this huge bunch of precious papers off to the agency... I was freaking out the entire 24 hours that it was in transit. What a relief it was to get the "Dossier Rec'd" email from them today!

So now the bad news... I emailed USCIS to determine whether our I800A case had been assigned to an officer yet. The officer is the person who reviews the case and all supporting materials, and makes the determination of whether we are approved to immigrate a child into the US. You can't get any movement until you are assigned an officer. So anyways, I emailed my inquiry and received a response from our officer (yay!). Unfortunately, she told me that she issued us an RFE ("Request For Evidence")... our homestudy contained some verbage that apparently it shouldn't have (even though our agency has sent many many homestudies with the same verbage and had no issue... apparently we got lucky. ) Normally, an RFE means a delay in getting your I800A. In our case, since we are still waiting on our fingerprint appts, hopefully everything will be resolved with this RFE before it causes us any delays. We have an amazing officer, thankfully... when she emailed me, she told me about the RFE but also told me that she had already contacted my agency, told them what needed to be fixed, and knew that they would be sending it along soon. It was like a major crisis that was handled completely by someone else... Normally, the adoption crisises are all on me, so its nice to breathe easy on this one.