Approval from USCIS

Receiving notice from USCIS today was a cherry on the sundae that we will call a wonderful day in the Wister Ratcliff household.

Frig and I arrived at school with plenty of time to accomplish all of the copying and TV/DVD (for a China history DVD Frig was showing in the room where he is subbing this week) acquisition that was necessary. The new principal introduced herself to Frig and when he told her that he was interested in becoming a dedicated sub (that means he would be at Lanier every day and it is the highest pay rate an associate teacher can achieve) her reply was that "we are working on that". We are both awake enough this evening to have great lively converstation and had really GREAT second days of school.

So as I said the letter was the cherry topper, but please keep in mind that this cherry is way oversized. When we arribed at home Frig checked the mail, as is his usual practice, and let me "do the honors" of opening the large manilla envelope with the USCIS seal accompaning the return address. It reads "Your I-600A, Application for Advanced Processing of Orphan Petetion has been approved". The rest of the letter, while formal, is also quite frendly and ends with "It has been a pleasure to be a part of your new adventure."

Needless to say when Frig went to pick up the dry cleaning and get mac&cheese, to go with dinner, he also bought a six-pack of Corona so that we would celebrate.

Profile in the mail!!!

So today Frig took the profile book to the USPS to mail it off today. Since it is only traveling 90min away I wouldn't think it would take very long to get there. I think this is the step we were able to finish in the least amount of time. Maybe we should call Kathy in a few days to make sure the precious book arrived without harm. I am pretty proud of how it turned out and hope Kathy approves. I hope it does it's magic and one day I can show it to our child as the labor of love that brought him or her to us.

Also, my friend went to a reproductive endocrinologist (RE) today because she has been trying to get pregnant for 1.5 yrs and doesn't want to wait as long as I did (at least someone has learned from my mistakes). Anyway, I like how her appointment went and am looking into their office hours. They mentioned clomid and didn't mention monitoring. The monitoring factor was one of the reason Frig and I decided not to pursue clomid with the first RE we went to and I couldn't get my OBGyn to give me a perscription. I thought it would be a bad idea to travel all around Houston randomly going to doctors trying to find a doctor that would write a script without wanting to monitor, but I know that there are doctors out there that fit that discription. So maybe we will have a third option on our plate one day.

Other Avenue

The lady (Kathy) from the other agency and I finally connected today. She said that I just need to mail her a copy of the HS and a profile. Kathy will then keep our information on file and hope to get us a match.

So I immediately called Mom and Dad Ratcliff to get them to send pictures that would be good for the profile. Kathy told me it doesn't have to be anything super fancy. Just a letter stating why we want to adopt and some pics (nothing to wordy). So I guess I will start working on the pic part this weekend and Frig has committed to the letter.