Prayers, Prints, and Planes

Can I just say that GOD totally rocks?!? Your adoption peeps will understand what a MIRACLE we encountered this week with our USCIS fingerprinting. Here's a little backstory for those of you not familiar with what USCIS fingerprinting is:

In order to adopt a child from a foreign country, you have to fill out a petition with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to classify an orphan as a member of your family, which in our case is called an I-600A form. A part of the process of getting approved is doing biometric fingerprints, or FBI prints. These prints are only good for 18 months, then they delete them, and your USCIS approval is expired.

So, we got our USCIS approval back in November of 2009, when we were in the beginning stages of the adoption process. Never in a million years did I think they would expire before our adoption was finalized! But alas, they expire February 27th, so it was necessary for us to have them re-done. We have known this was the case, but our adoption agency kept telling us to hold off on having them re-done because they kept thinking we would get a court date before they expired. Well, you all know that story if you've been keeping up with our adoption. If you're new to this blog go back to August 2010 and start reading there to catch up.

We held off until we KNEW there was NO WAY we were getting a court date before they expired, sent off our request, and got our fingerprinting date...February 7. However, due to who-knows-what, we were told that the USCIS was backed up on printing and it could take up to three months to get our prints back from the date they were taken. Since our court date is March 17th, we couldn't wait three months. Our agency advised us to start PRAYING and call our Senators and State Representatives to ask for help getting the prints expedited.

We called both Richard Shelby's and Jeff Sessions' offices. Both were very helpful, but I have to say, Richard Shelby's office was incredibly responsive. We called them before we got printed and they told us exactly what they needed to help. So as soon as our prints were taken on Monday, we emailed them and let them know the prints were done. We were told it would take at least 48 hours just for the prints to get into the system so we didn't expect to hear anything back from them for a couple of days. Imagine our shock when LESS THAN 24 HOURS LATER...ON TUESDAY MORNING, THE 8TH, RICHARD SHELBY'S OFFICE CALLED GREG AND TOLD HIM THEY JUST GOTTEN OFF THE PHONE WITH USCIS, THE PRINTS WERE DONE AND OUR USCIS APPROVAL WAS IN THE MAIL!!! I have to give huge props to Shelby's office for their kindness and responsiveness, but we all know all the glory goes to God for making this happen. It was like God was just saying, "See? I got this. Don't worry and don't be afraid."

Just another MIRACLE in Kirill's story. God works so powerfully through the least of these and I'm so humbled to get to be his mommy.

One last thing...we've been working on our plane tickets this week. Can I just say how exciting it's been to book two round-trip tickets and one one-way ticket? When we got the itinerary with "Gregory Kirill Davis" printed in black and white, I almost broke down. It makes it so real. One month from today we will leave to go get him...I CANNOT WAIT!