At first I thought it was a cruel joke. When I brought in the mail yesterday I immediately saw a giant brown envelope from Homeland Security. I was shaking with excitement as I opened it. But inside was only our birth certificates and marriage license -- no letter, no receipt, no post-it note, nothing! We had included our birth certificates and marriage license in our application packet months ago... so why had they been sent back to us? Was something wrong with them? Were they rejected? We had no immediate way of knowing because the Dallas office of Homeland Security will not accept phone calls or emails from non-government personnel. The ONLY way to find out what this meant would be to send a letter requesting the status and then wait weeks for them to (possibly) reply. I burst into tears! I was just certain that our application had been denied for some obscure reason and that it would take months to get everything straightened out.

Sometime later in the day (after slightly recovering from the cruel disappointment of receiving documents with no cover letter) I grabbed the remaining mail off the table - only normal-sized business envelopes - bills and junk mail for sure. But there it was... an unassuming little white envelope, also from Homeland Security. Inside was a plain form letter entitled "Notice of Favorable Determination Concerning Application For Advance Processing of Orphan Petition." And again I burst into tears - but this time happy tears!

Th 171-H approval letter has loomed so large in our minds, I had come to think of it as larger than life. As if it should arrive with trumpets sounding! So why did Homeland Security use a huge brown envelope to return our (relatively) unimportant birth certificates and marriage license, and a tiny plain white envelope to send our ALL IMPORTANT approval letter -- who knows? And at this point who cares? Despite the mini roller-coaster of emotions, I am thrilled to announce that we are now, finally, PAPER READY!

Being paper ready means is that we are officially in line to be matched with a baby. That's the fantastic news. The slightly disappointing news is that there are 16 parents ahead of us in line. Over the next several weeks as each baby is born and placed for adoption, he/she will be referred to the next applicant in line waiting for his/her specific gender, and we will move up one notch on the list. When we get to the top of the list, the very next baby-girl will be referred to us!

The referrals usually happen within a week or so after birth. Our agency will contact us and tell us that they have a referral packet to send. Then they will email us a copy of everything they have about the baby, including: photos at birth, weight, length, head circumference, and the results of the initial medical tests for AIDS, hepatitis, alcohol and drug dependency, plus a slew of tests for other birth conditions. We will have 3-4 days to either accept or decline the referral. Unless there is a serious birth condition, we plan to accept right away. If there is a condition that concerns us, we'll take the medical records to a Pediatrician and get his/her medical opinion. If we do decline a referral (which is very unlikely) we will stay at the top of the list and receive the next baby-girl referral.

Our agency has told us that based on the average number of births it should take 4-6 weeks for us to get to the top of the list and receive our referral. Once we have accepted a referral then we sign a Power of Attorney that allows the Guatemalan attorney to begin the legal adoption process. If we don't run into any big glitches in the legal process, 4-6 months later we will be bringing our little girl home! Yea! So we're looking at anytime from late-Dec / early-Jan through late-Feb / early-Mar for our bring home date. Of course we would REALLY love to have her home for Christmas, but it's more likely that she'll be home in time for Gary's b-day in March.

I think of all the waiting lists in the adoption process, the wait to see our baby girl for the first time will be second only to the final wait to bring her home. Because honestly, waiting for an unknown bureaucrat to sign a piece of paper is really just mind-numbing! So here's to a wait that leaves butterflies in our stomachs!

... my very next post should include the first pictures of our baby-girl...