Adoption update

Exodus 14:14 ~ The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.

Since we posted in December about receiving our referral, we have felt much prayer and can feel God orchestrating many of the details in our journey to bring our daughter home.  We've had several of you ask on our progress & what this means so below I shared a few praises the of what the last several weeks have held in bringing Keziah home...

• Right after our referral acceptance, while Haven was at pre-school, I spent a morning at Starbucks combing through our large binder of paperwork to ensure we haven't/hadn't missed any important updates on things such as home study, fingerprints, immigration [USCIS], etc...low and behold, while April of 2014 was in my mind for when our USCIS expired and we were repeatedly told to not let this expire as we would have to pay another large fee, I missed a small print date of federal fingerprints expiring on Jan. 2, 2014.  I was extremely disappointed in myself, because I knew the timing of our reprints would need to be a true act of God as with our upcoming Miller family trip (Dec. 13-18) and Kellenberger Iowa trip (Dec. 24-29), we would completely be at the government's whim on what/when we should show up...when they say jump in the adoption world, you don't question..."you ask how high & how often?".  We overnighted our information to Kansas City and prayed fervently that we would receive a date before our Jan. 2nd expiration date.  On Dec. 12th, our usually slow mail route arrived earlier than holiday-usual and in it was our USCIS fingerprint date of Dec. 23rd at 12:00pm in Naperville...such a praise!  Not only did we not have to reschedule travel plans with either planned family trips (which we were definitely prepared to do), it gave us plenty of time before our Jan. 2nd date. 
• We received Keziah's medical report on New Year's Eve night and it is so good!  Knowing relatively nothing about her when accepting our referral in early December, it was a great comfort to see her blood reports, height/weight measurements, etc come through.  Based upon her medical report, the Ugandan doctor assumed her DOB was about 3-3.5 year old (we didn't have an actual DOB yet) and thus we would have to re-file our USCIS as her height/weight indicated a larger than average 2 year old.  Our immigration paperwork is only cleared to accept a girl ages 0-2.  So we began researching about changing our home study with the state of IL and with USCIS so our paperwork would accept 0-3/4.
• In mid-January, we received contact from our agency in Texas that her actual DOB is September 20, 2011.  So in fact, Keziah is only 28 months today!   Even more surreal is God's timing in that she was born about a week and half after my earthly father met our Heavenly Father!

What does this now mean?  Well, we continue to work on updating our IL home study material (things like physicals, additional fingerprints, etc) and continue to pray for our little girl.  We still don't anticipate traveling for about 6-8 months to go and bring her home and oh, how the days sometimes drag!  Even with our little active Miller playing punching bags in my belly, I still feel/hear/desire/think about our little girl 1/2 world away.

Prayers would be appreciated for the following...

• God to orchestrate the details of paperwork, travel, dates, etc with our baby boy & Keziah.
• The Ugandan judges, probation officers, investigators would view our case favorably and in the best interest for Keziah.
• Transition for Haven as we are already sensing by questions/conversations/behavior that she understands this is going to be a big year for our family.
• God has provided such great care & provisions already...continue to pray that our final support for travel costs and travel fees would be covered and God would provide when needed.
• That we can continue to be still and wait upon Him as He fights for us & orchestrates this all.

  

Haven helping us stuff our Christmas cards & realizing some else is in our family letter :)

Sharing our referral news with the Millers & Schlipfs at Thanksgiving....I love Kaleigh's face!