Where We Stand

So our home study is now complete and awaiting final approval from our adoption agency. Since it has been reviewed once before, I think it is safe to assume that it will need very few if any revisions. From there we will fill out our I800A and submit it to NBC along with our home study and some other documentation.

NBC stands for National Benefits Center and is a department of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that was created to process Hague Convention cases. The Hague Adoption Convention dictates how an international adoption will be processed. Not all countries are Hague countries. There are certain guidelines a country must meet in order to become a Hague country. Bulgaria is still working to get their footing as a Hague Country which is why things are not moving forward very quickly. Ultimately, the level of stability and protection it brings both the children and the parents is worth it. Just as a point of reference, China is another Hague country. The current wait for a healthy child in China is now hovering around five years. This is not due so much to slow processing, although China does have a lot more requirements than Bulgaria, but it is do more so to the enormous number of adoptions that China processes each year. In 2010, 3401 children were adopted from China.  Compare that with 40 in Bulgaria. You can look up all the adoption stats you please (because I know you're dying to) on the U.S. Government's Adoption Website.

After we submit our I800A to NBC, we should receive a fingerprinting appointment for around 3-4 weeks later. Hopefully, sometime in the last two weeks of July. We will then be fingerprinted and if everything goes as planned, we hope to receive our approval from NBC in August.

From that point, our next step will be to gather all our documents and have them apostilled at the capitol through the Texas Secretary of State's office. I've explained what an apostille is before, but basically it validates the documents and proves that the notarizations are authentic.

Once we have finished all of this, we will submit everything to AGCI and then from there to Bulgaria. We will then wait for approval and to be registered with the country of Bulgaria. Once we are registered, we then begin what we expect to be about an 18-24 month wait. We will not know anything about our daughter until we receive a referral. The waiting period is long, and I have no doubt, at times it will be very frustrating, but we are not going into this with our eyes shut. We are praying that things pick up and our wait is shortened, but as I've said time and time again, we will be blessed with the daughter that God intends for us at just the right time.

Please continue to keep us in your prayers, and in particular pray that everything gets done quickly and smoothly so that we can be registered with MOJ in Bulgaria. Right now that is our short term goal, and I am very excited to actually see it within our grasp. Thank you again for all your encouragement and support. And sorry if this reads a little bit (or a lot) like a (very interesting) research paper. It's my analytical mind that likes to sort everything and explain it as well as possible.