Doing "NOTHING" is not easy

I feel a little bit like I am being driven insane by the instructions from our agency to DO NOTHING.

They do seem to make these instructions very clear. We are, at the moment, waiting for our Homestudy to be submitted to the agency (should be by next Friday.) Shortly thereafter, we will receive notice that the homestudy has been "approved" by Holt. Then, and only then, are we to submit an application to the USCIS called an I600A, and this must be done IMMEDIATELY upon receipt of the news that the homestudy is approved.

Then, we wait some more.

We wait for a letter from the USCIS (formerly known as the INS) telling us to drive to Cleveland and be fingerprinted.

And we wait for a file from Holt. A file that will have the picture and history of "Samuel" in it. (Or, I suppose, very unexpectedly, a picture of "Nadia/Annika/Ariel" in it.) And when that file hits our front porch, courtesy of the FedEx man, we will immediately be required to start running around like chickens with our heads cut off to obtain documents for our dossier. (With the exception of certified copies of our birth and marriage certificates which we had to get for our homestudy, and our passports, which of course we already had.)

This goes entirely against everything else I know about adopting from Asia, but, since everything I know about adopting from Asia comes from people who adopted from China, what the hell do I know? See, when you adopt from China, you have to submit your dossier documents FIRST and then you wait for months and months and months, and then the Chinese authorities refer a child to your adoption agency to be referred to you.

But, evidently, adopting from Vietnam, at least through Holt, you get a referral FIRST, and THEN do your dossier and wait for approval from the Vietnamese.

I have actually just sent an email to my agency asking for reassurance that I should be doing NOTHING right now.

I am pretty sure they are going to write back and ask if I am illiterate, because it is all spelled out in black and white in the Vietnam program guide, which is roughly the size of one of my law school textbooks. (And which I must admit, I have read with much more thoroughness than I read some of my law textbooks.)

This is not easy. Do NOTHING. Wait wait wait...okay, NOW. DO [insert particular instruction here] RIGHT THIS BLOODY SECOND...Wait, wait, wait...okay, NOW, do A BUNCH OF INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATING PAPERCHASING RIGHT NOW. Wait some more.

Law Mommy