Waiting, and Waiting, and Waiting.

Only other adoptive families understand when you say that we have been waiting almost 5 weeks for our I-171H to arrive. For everyone else out there-this is an approval from the INS saying they have cleared you for adoption, and you will be allowed to bring an orphaned child into the country. So this is a VERY critical piece of paper. We are at a standstill in the process until this arrives. So bring it on!!! Part of this approval process is getting your fingerprints done for the FBI-which involves going to the INS service center(let me remind you again that we live in TX) so that gives you a feel for the fact that we were the only people there getting our prints done for adoption. Lucky for us it wasn't busy when we arrived on this early Saturday morning. We were taken straight back, David with one guy, and me with another. But of course I was assigned to the guy that was working his first day-yeah that's right his first day on the job. "D" was finished in about 3 1/2 minutes flat-so he comes around to watch the "new guy" try to get my prints. 20 minutes later when the "new guy" is still trying to get my prints-"new guy" turns to me and says "WOW, you have really worn prints-what do you do for a living?" Well my initial excitement over the mere prospect of getting our appt. for fingerprinting-has diminished to a quivering lip, and tears welling up in my eyes. The "new guy" is now sensing my imminent meltdown, and goes to get a "more experienced" fingerprint expert. When he arrives he looks at the computer and sees that "new guy" has only been able to get 4 out of 10 of my prints to register. So here we go again-we roll, and we roll, and we roll. He finally gets all 10 prints on the screen. He then says "well we will just have to wait and see how it turns out" "you have pretty bad prints-but we will just hope for the best" WHAT?????? ARE YOU KIDDING ME???????? Clearly he was not understanding that as the days tick by in this process it is only getting longer-I am suppose to have an Aug LID-doesn't he know that? I don't have time for "let's just wait and see" Let's consider for just a second; if I had robbed a bank to pay for our adoption-CSI would be able to find me within the hour. I am certain of that-it happens on every episode-they have a "partial print" and they always find them. Okay, I watch too much television. But I do have a point there. Well it has been 3 weeks since that appt. and in the mean time I have not heard from them telling me that the prints were not accepted-so I think we must be in the clear. But initially after this incident I posted on my adoption board to ask if anyone had any experience with this circumstance. I received a fair amount of replies-everyone trying to make me feel better, and telling me to not worry it would be fine. Then about 3 days later some guy post a reply to tell me that the exact same thing had happened to them-his wife was a chemist, and had burned most of her prints off-He started his post with "Do Not Panic" he tells me how there is a process where you are rejected 3 times, and then you go for an interview with the FBI-then he finishes off by saying it only set them back 4 MONTHS!! Okay, it was an out of body experience for me to read this post-my head just about spun off my body! I couldn't believe this guy was telling me this-and I knew full well that his wife would kill him if she knew he had said DO NOT PANIC, and it only set us back 4 MONTHS in the same post to an adoptive mother. Well it took about a week, and several glasses of wine for me to get over this. So as I said it has been 3 weeks since the prints-and it really has been 5 weeks tomorrow since they received our paperwork. Just like everything else in adoption there is really no way to know when this approval might arrive. Some people have gotten theirs in 10 days, others have waited 10 weeks. I have convinced my crazy little brain that I shouldn't even start looking until around Aug 10th-that would be 7 weeks for processing-and if it were to arrive that week-I think we are still good for an AUG LID. This process is all about waiting, and waiting, and waiting some more. So we are just going to wait, and wait and wait some more. We can WAIT with the best of them.
the waiting mom