The Paperchase~June 2004-February 2005

When we got home with Allie, we pretty much knew that we would be going back to get her a little sister. She is 8 years younger than Ryan and we didn't want her to be the only child left at home for so many years. We also thought that it would be nice for her to have a sibling that shared her birthcountry. Since we adopted Allie on December 8, 2003, we couldn't be DTC again until December 8, 2004. We went our application to Harrah Family Services in June of 2004. Our social worker (not afilliated with HFS) didn't want to start our homestudy until we readopted Allie. That ended up taking until August to complete. As it turned out, it didn't matter because Jeff and I both had to have some medical procedures before our doctors would sign off on the Medicals and letters. Both turned out to be minor but Jeff's doctor took a while to get the letter back to us. Even though our homestudy was complete, our dossier consultant would not let us send on our I-600A until that letter was in her hands. She wanted to make sure that the letter matched the homestudy information exactly. So on October 18, 2004, we were finally able to send in our I-600A. We were fingerprinted on November 17. Our 171-H arrived on January 18 and we were DTC on February 10...a full 2 months after we had planned. Our LID ended up being a bit later than we anticipated-March 3, 2005-but we had a LID and the countdown could begin! As soon as we found out that we had a March log in, I knew that our referral would come on October 3, 2 years to the day after we got Allie's.