Family Pics (minus one)

A's school asked for a picture of our family.  We used it as a good excuse to take some updated photos.

M cracked us up with this pose.  She wanted us to take a picture of herself.  She walked right up those stairs and without skipping a beat picked this as her pose.  

One Day

I remember a while back reading something online about how every moment of everyday is so important.  It said something along the lines of, tell an Olympic swimmer that a .05 seconds isn't important or a golf pro that a centimeter isn't important.  It was a long list of how short periods of time and space can make an impact that can last forever.  

This morning as our facilitator was going over all of our paper work to send back the evidence to USCIS she realized something pretty amazing.  One of the things that has changed since starting our process is that the region that U now lives has been shut down for adoptions.  You can be grandfathered into the law if a certain piece of paper is issued before June 12, 2013.  Our piece of paper was issued on June 11th!!!  One day later and our ability to bring our family of five together would be near impossible.  One. Day.  That blows my mind!!  Thank you God!

Praise the Lord.  Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever. Psalm 106:1

Evidence

Yesterday was 4 weeks exactly from the time we mailed in our binder to USCIS for approval.  They say it takes approx. 4 weeks to hear back from them and they held true to that estimate by the day.

Yesterday we received a letter in the mail from USCIS that our case has not YET been approved.  Without going into the details, we need to provide additional evidence to support that U is truly an orphan.  It is bitter sweet news....on the one hand R and I know that he is a true orphan based on other documents and information that we have been given.  On the other hand it is very encouraging to know that the government is going to great lengths to make sure all children leaving DRC are, without any reservation, truly an orphan needing a family.

After we sent in our binder, our facilitator was able to pull almost all of the remaining documents together.  This is such a HUGE blessing and surprise!!!  We recieved two of those documents last night which we are waiting to be translated into English so we can learn even more about our little Mr. Cute Face.  At this point, we need to wait for two specific people in Congo (I'll be vague since this is on the internet) to get to a place with internet and email our facilitator the remaining documents.  We hope for that to be this week.  From there we will get it translated to English, send in the remaining evidence and wait for final approval from USCIS which should take approximetly 2 weeks from the time they receive the additional evidence.  Then we move on to a bunch of steps that take place in Congo.

Today we are thankful for many things but mostly for continued evidence that God is working on behalf of U!