USCIS

Lots of activity this week!!!

We submitted our request to the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services)to bring an orphan into the country. We must have approval from them before our court date to complete the adoption in Russia. In some regions you must have it before your first trip. They will contact us to set up an appointment to be fingerprinted by the FBI. Once we get clearance they will send us documentation stating the child will become a U.S. citizen once we return to the US.

Side note: some people refer to the USCIS as the BCIS(Bureau of Citizens Immigration Services) they are the same thing.

The documentation we sent to the USCIS included a copy of our home study and various documents from our agency with proof of their accreditation and their recommendation to allow us to adopt.

We are hoping to have an appointment for fingerprinting in the next 4-6 weeks. Fingers crossed!

Picture of the new chair for the babies room! It is very comfortable!!! The small red chair was mine when I was small. It was one of my favorite things. Hopefully the baby will enjoy it as well!

~ The Rileys

home study approval

Our agency finished our home study!! H-O-O-R-A-Y!!!!

They emailed us a copy Thursday. We proofed and reviewed the documents and things look great!! We will receive the hard copies early next week. If this schedule holds we will be to get all of our documents apostilled next Friday. 

A great picture of our friend, Kristin, notarizing one of our many many documents. 

Thank you Kristin!!! This was a huge undertaking!!!

The Rileys

quick update

Just a quick update:

After emailing with our agency they informed us we are next in line for our home study review! Awesome! The home study must be reviewed by a panel of three social workers from our agency. We should get an email version by the end of the week to review and then the original paper copies next week. Progress is being made!! 

The Rileys

interview #4

Our finally home study interview was Monday. It also went great! We just had a few wrap up questions. Now our social worker will write her report and send it to be edited and approved. In around two weeks we should get a copy. So now we wait!




Fun fact: Russia has the worlds largest forest reserves and is know as "the lungs of Europe" and is second only to the Amazon rain forest in the amount of O2.

interviews 2 &3

Scott and I had our individual interviews Friday morning. They went great! Just more questions that were easy to answer. I will say it again...our social worker is awesome!!! You feel like you are talking to a friend about life, your goals, and plans. Last interview is scheduled for Monday at 6:00pm!

We also did a little shopping this weekend...I will post pics tomorrow of what we got!


Fun Facts:
The Russian alphabet contains 33 letters. 11 vowels 20 consonants and 2 pronunciation signs.

interview #1

We met with our social worker for interview #1 tonight! It went GREAT! She was super nice and very sweet. It lasted about 45 minutes. She took a tour of our house and asked a bunch of basic questions: how did we meet? why we want to adopt from Russia? childcare plan? ect....

We meet again tomorrow for our individual interviews and then again on Monday.

So rounds 2 and 3 start tomorrow at 10!!

Scott is a rock star! He came home from a coaching clinic in Greensboro today and immediately started working on what is pictured below. I love, love it!!! It is on the wall behind the changing table and bookshelf.

Fun Facts:  Russia was the first country to launch a man into space. His name was Yuri Gagarin. He was the first man in orbit and successfully flew around the globe several times on April 12th 1961.

This is not to be confused with Alan Shepard,first American astronaut, whose flight was suborbital.

Updates

We have been busy,busy in the Riley house over the past two weeks!! We went to the beach for a week over the 4th and during this last week have been preparing for our home study! We meet with our social worker on    Thursday, July 21st. This meeting will be conducted at our house. She will interview us together for the first meeting. The next day,Friday, we will each meet with her individually. That will take care of meetings 1,2,and 3. So we just have to schedule one last meeting with her for the following week. That will finish our home study!! I CANNOT BELIEVE IT!!!

All of our paperwork has now been submitted for the home study. We actually placed the last few pages in the mail today. We got our SBI clearance while we were on vacation and finished our 10 hour online class. We also completed our community resource sheet. The community resource sheet is designed to help you begin to think about your child care plan and what medical/physiological resources may be needed in the future. So glad to have that completed. We now have a great list that includes doctors who are covered in our insurance plan and their phone numbers. We also found a great pediatrician in Raleigh who specializing in working with children who have been adopted internationally and she is taking new patients! Hooray!!

We have also put a new ceiling fan in the babies room and I just had to share a picture. It might be the coolest ceiling fan EVER! It has a world globe light fixture and moon and stars on the blades.  Scott found it at Home Depot. He also installed it himself, which is a big deal in this house because the electrical is not the most up to date. Picture is below!

Fun Fact:   Moscow’s metro system, Metrostroy, is one of the largest in the world.(Second actually to Tokyo)  Today, it consists of 9,915 trains that travel on 12 lines spanning the city. Nine million passengers use the Moscow subway each day. It is bigger and busier then New York's subway and London's underground put together.  It was built during Stalin's rule and is said to display some of Russia best architecture.  Half of the stations are deep level stations and doubled as bomb shelters during WWII and nuclear fall out stations during the Cold War.

Picture of one of the stations. I had to share...I was shocked a subway station could look like this!