Courtney, our social worker at Evolve, returned from her vacation on Wednesday. I gave her until 10:00 am to follow up with her about our home study progress and ensure that she had received the updates from Hopscotch that she had inadvertently missed changing last week. Evolve's email system had been filtering out the emails from Hopscotch as spam, so I had an excuse to confirm that she had indeed received Hopscotch's changes. She responded that she had received the changes and had one last question for her manager before she could finalize our Home Study Report, which she expected to do the following day. Yes! The end of our first big step in the process was almost here! I had everything in order to send off our I-600a documents to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) once I had my hands on our finalized Home Study Report.
I contacted Hopscotch to let them know we should have a finalized Home Study Report on Thursday and thank goodness I did. Jeanette from Hopscotch responded saying once our Home Study was complete, to email it to them for a final review and that she would then send Hopscotch's approval letter which needed to accompany our I-600a. Had I not known that bit of information, our I-600a would have been on its way to USCIS without all our documents.
Thursday morning I emailed Courtney to check-in and let her know I'd be picking up our Home Study and to let me know as soon as it was completed. I was checking my email every few minutes all day long, hoping to get a response that our Home Study was ready. By 2:00 pm, I had still not heard back. Evolve closes at 4:30 pm and is not open on Fridays, so I feared we would have to wait until Monday. At 2:30 pm, I sent one more email checking in to see if it would be completed that day. And at 2:49 pm, she responded - our Home Study was signed and ready to be picked up!! Woo hoo!! One huge step in the right direction!
The next hour was a mad dash as I loaded up the girls without a moment to spare and we headed to Stillwater to pick up our finalized Home Study. Stillwater is about 30 minutes away and the boys' buses get home around 4:00 pm, so the race was on. We got to Evolve just in time to grab the envelop and take off once again to beat the buses home. Cole's bus is usually the first home shortly after 4:00 pm, but sometimes it runs early. We sped home to find Cole's bus had just arrived to drop him off. Phew! After getting everyone unloaded, I emailed a copy of our Home Study to Jeanette at Hopscotch and waited to hear back. I had sent it after 5:00 pm eastern time so I hadn't expected her to respond until the next day, although I had hoped she would as she had previously returned emails after work hours.
Early this morning I emailed her to see if she had had time to review our Home Study and if it looked okay (I was quite concerned that one of her changes may not have been made correctly.) At 9:00 am she responded saying everything looked good and sent us Hopscotch's approval letter! YES! We had everything we needed to move forward to the next step.
After dropping off Rose at preschool, Kate and I were on our way to UPS to mail our I-600a to USCIS in Texas. Our documents will arrive Monday morning, be logged into their system, reviewed and hopefully approved. This part of the process can vary significantly. Our approval could come as quick as 4 weeks or as long as 12 weeks. Once approved, our dossier (all the documents we need to adopt from Guyana) will be sent to Guyana for their approval.
For now, we hold tight and pray for a quick approval from USCIS.
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