USCIS Fingerprinting

Yesterday was our scheduled day to go in for our fingerprinting with the USCIS. Our appointments were scheduled for 11am, so we dropped the girls at my mom’s at 10am in order to give us plenty of time to get there.  We had to go all the way to south seattle to the Home Land Security Offices where the USCIS was located.  I don’t know why, but nothing ever goes smoothly for us when it comes to this adoption stuff and yesterday was no different.  We realized, after we dropped the girls off, that Jason had grabbed the wrong paper and the one we needed was still at home.  They required us to bring our fingerprint appointment forms with us and Jason had accidently grabbed another form they had sent us instead.  We had to drive all the way home, which was 15 minutes away.  Once we left our house we only had 40 minutes to drive 40 miles in Seattle traffic.  Needless to say we were both a little stressed.  We had no idea what would happen if we were late.  They stressed on the form we received in the mail that if we failed to make it to our appointment that we would not be receiving another one.  This was the final important step in our adoption paperwork and if it didn’t get done, we would not be able to adopt.  I think I prayed all the way there that we would make it on time or at least close to on time.

Somehow we managed to arrive just 5 minutes late.  We were definitely lucky or I guess we were blessed to not run into any traffic the whole way there.  Once we got there we had to go through security and then got a number, filled out our forms and our numbers were called almost immediately after our forms were done.  We were in and out in less than a half hour.  The lady doing my fingerprints mentioned that not as many people are doing adoptions this year as there were last year.  She said that if we had come there last year, we would have had to wait hours to get our fingerprints done.  I guess with all the new restrictions and requirements it is getting harder and harder to adopt internationally, so fewer people are doing it.  I can definitely understand why.  If we had known ahead of time how hard all of this was going to be, I’m not sure we would have gone through with it.  Although, when you know it is what you are suppose to be doing, nothing is too difficult.  It feels so good right now to know that everything is finished and now all we have to do is wait.  I’m sure something else will come up while we wait for our approval, but at least we know that right now it is all out of our hands.