On Thursday, we took a quick trip to Jacksonville with our friends Derick and Shannon. They made the decision to adopt a child from Kazakhstan at almost the same time we made our decision, and its been an amazing blessing to walk through this process with them.
An important part of the international adoption process involves working with USCIS (United States Citizen and Immigration Services). We had to fill out Form I-600A, which is the Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition. Basically, this is our request in advance to be allowed to bring home an orphan and adopt him into our family. We had to send in our home study report, and birth and marriage certificates along with the application.
Once they received our request, they sent us a notice with our fingerprint appointment. Derick and Shannon got their notices just days before we did...perfect timing!) We needed to go into the nearest USCIS regional office (in Jacksonville) and be fingerprinted. These will be procesesd to make sure we are cleared to adopt an orphan. They took our fingerprints using a scanner and a computer--no black ink required. It was a fairly quick process, and it was nice to leave not looking like a criminal with black fingers. :-)
Once our I-600A is processed, we will receive our I-171H, which is the Notice of Favorable Determination Concerning Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition. (Yikes--that's a mouthful!). This is one of the forms we will need to present to the judge when we're in Russian court.
We won't need the I-171H until our second trip to Russia, so waiting on this form will not hold up our process at all. We're still waiting for word on our agency reaccreditation, and will post more as soon as we hear something!
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