"When will you get your baby?"

This question is becoming more and more common, and we love to be asked this and about how our adoption is moving along! It means a lot to know that people care and are excited about us expecting another child!

Here is our best guess as to when we will have our newest Schmidt...

Our I-600A orphan petition was received and stamped by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on June 12, 2007. At the moment, it is taking 4 months from when an application is received until it is processed. (I used this site to figure that out: https://egov.uscis.gov/cris/jsps/officeProcesstimes.jsp?selectedOffice=16) So, our best guess is that we will get our I-171H approval by mid to late October.

By the time we receive this paper that we need from USCIS, we will have had collected everything else that we need. We will take our pile of papers that were notarized in NC to the NC Secretary of State to have them authenticated. I'm think that will go quickly since we will be taking them personally.

After we make lots of copies of our dossier, it will be ready to FedEx to America World (AWAA) in VA, near DC. They will walk our papers to the US Secretary of State for authentication and then to the Ethiopian Embassy. We are guessing that all of this will be completed in November or December.

After this , our papers are ready to go to Ethiopia to the Ministry of Women and Children's Affairs where our family will be matched with a child who is waiting for a family. I'm afraid to guess on this part. When we signed with AWAA, the minimum wait for a referral was supposedly 4 months, but nobody has waited that long yet. So far, AWAA has only completed 4 adoptions in Ethiopia, and we are down the list a bit. I would guess that we could wait the 2-4 months (but it could be less, could be more!). That would put us into the February-April range so that William and I would be travelling between March and June.

THIS IS ALL AN ESTIMATE! :-) We realize that everything will happen in God's perfect timing, and we appreciate your prayers for our family and for our little one in Ethiopia. Keep checking our blog!