Still waiting

I have been postponing blogging this week to make the big announcement that our homestudy was completed. It has been 59 days since we met with our social worker. When we met her back in mid december, it had taken us just 14 days to do all the paperwork for the homestudy. Our social worker thought she would have it written by the first of the year, but that she had a month to complete it. One month came and gone, second month just past us. We have had some hiccups during the process. Things didn't get sent out as soon as they should have, needed a clarification on one word that agency couldn't get what they wanted from the other party, after a couple of weeks, they clue us in, we got on the ball and started calling both parties everyday until we got the clarification which came in on Monday morning. Our homestudy agency emailed us and the agency that has Erin's file a copy of the report to make sure no changes need to be made. We changed some of the things. The agency that has the file, they are located out in Delaware which has been in a snow storm the past couple of days and even lost power, so we are still waiting. We have been praying very hard that we will get the homestudy completed by this week. On the postive side, immigrations is speeding up a little bit...average wait was 6 weeks and this past week, people are posting 4 weeks from the date it arrives at immigrations to fingerprint appt. So we will hope the same success. What is our estimated time frame now? if no more hiccups the earlist is more then likely August.
Many people have asked questions about who is going, how much money do we still need to raise and so forth. Right now we are focusing on raising enough money for both Dave and I to go. My sister Cindy is coming along and Jade will be joining us if it is during the summer months. As for the younger girls, they are staying home unless we raise enough money for them to go.
We continue to do fundraisers. At the moment there are three of them going on. We have the wonderful t-shirt ones. This week adoption bug (t-shirt company) is now allowing us to fundraise 6 instead of 4 shirts. We kept the current 4 designs but have added brown to two of them. We love our shirts, they are very soft and continue to be soft after you wash them. They run a little bit on the smaller size. I just recently joined the barefoot books fundraiser. Most of these books are geared to the kids. There are some good, interesting books for sale. We get a percentage of the commision. Both of these links can be found on the right side of the blog. Feel free to check it out. We are planning a 12 hour (9A-9P) craft/scrapbooking day on March 20. We have creative memories and stampin' up consultants coming and I am currently waiting for a response back from a massager. If you are interested, please email me at smbarrett1@yahoo.com.

So while we wait we have been busy doing lots of family things. The picture above is us making things for our FCC CNY festival that is taking place on the 21st of Feb. My sister, neice and a friend of my neice and Jade came over and we worked for about 3 1/2 hours after we had wonderful pizza. This room is going to be Erin's room. the panda design is from when Monika was a baby. I haven't decided if I going to change it before Erin comes home, or wait until she comes home and let her decide what design she wants. Right now it works out as a great extra room.
My girls love to put ponies, barettes in people hair, these are their last victims. They do such a wonderful job and they miss mommie's hair being long, because they can't do my hair anymore.
Even though the wait for the homestudy has been stressful and hard at times. I have said many prayers to Jesus, to give me the patience I need for the waiting time, but also to strength to let go of the control I want so bad with this adoption, It can't happen fast enough. I have total trust that he has picked the perfect time for us to be united with Erin, I just wish I knew when. The fear of the unknown is strong, and can be a hard thing.