Praying for Godspeed

It has been five weeks since we returned from Bulgaria.  Waiting to go back and get Abigail is very, very difficult.  We miss her so much.  Fortunately we have a good online community of others adopting from Bulgaria to keep us in the know for expected timing of each step of the way.

On April 12th, our I-800 application was provisionally approved.  On April 20th, the Bureau of Consular Affairs sent a notification letter to us that they sent the I-800 approval to the U.S. Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria.  So now we wait for the approval from Bulgaria.  From what we have been able to ascertain, this is  how the process should go from here:

The U.S. Embassy notifies our adoption agency (Vesta) representatives in Bulgaria that they have received the I-800 approval notification.

Vesta takes to the Embassy (by scheduled appointment) the DS-230 Application for Immigrant Visa completed form (http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/81807.pdf) and payment.  Once the Embassy approves the DS-230 form, we get something called an Article 5 Letter.  If you would like to know what that looks like, here is an example: http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/105116.pdf

After the Article 5 Issuance, our paperwork goes to the Bulgaria Minister of Justice for signature.  Then our agency is notified of that, and Vesta then gets a court date scheduled for our file.

We do not attend the court date.  If all goes smoothly, on the court date we will be the official parents of Abigail.  Then, there could be up to another wait (after being officially her parents!) for notification of second trip to go pick her up. This is because of paperwork necessary to get her back into the United States as a citizen (Visa, passport, adoption paperwork, etc) from what I understand.

Please be praying that all this goes very swiftly in spite of lots of holidays for Bulgarians in May and May 12th election of new government officials.  May God speed our paperwork through.  We miss Abigail so much!

Learning English

Well, it has been about two weeks now (this Saturday) since we returned from Bulgaria.  The wait gets harder with each passing day.  Will we make it the four to six months? I suppose we shall have to do so.  But it is hard.  We miss Abigail so much.  However, we are able to communicate by e-mail through the lady we hired to tutor Abigail in English.  As any proud mom might do, I give you the word lists that Abigail has been learning over the past two weeks (as reported by her tutor):

First week:

She learned English words: life, live, visit, wish, wait, go, favourite, food, hungry, always, sometime, house, young, old, time, parents, family, new, big, small, swim, week, usually, often, never, sun, sunny, weather, happy, sleep, know. We learned pronouns.

Second week:

She learned English words: grandmother, grandfather, plate, pan, kitchen, bed, chest, living room, adore, mountain, Good morning, Good afternoon, Good evening, Good night, doll, toys, street, pick up, cinema, Of course, Be careful, Let me show you, dress, telephone, book, birthday. Wе learn from The Past Simple Tense.

Note to self: call a movie theater "cinema" if we want to take her to the movies. :)

Some would tell us that it is a waste of time to be paying someone to teach her now when she will pick it up quick once she is here and in school.  Nevertheless, it would be helpful to communicate with her when we pick her up and while we are here before she starts school.  So we think it is worth it (beside the fact the tutor is our only direct contact with her during the wait period).

We are told that Abigail painted a picture of our house for us.  Instead of drawing they call it painting there, but we never saw paint, so I presume the tutor means with crayons or colored pencils.  We gave her a photo book of places and people here, so she would have an example from which to draw the house.  I am curious to see her rendition.   We asked Abigail what she liked to draw beside houses and trees.  She said buildings and flowers.  We may just have an architect, landscape designer or civil engineer on our hands.  

Well, that is all the news for now.  We are also in the middle of some paperwork processes to get documents to the government, but I thought the above information was probably more interesting than going into paper chase details.  

Until next time...