Several possibilities, no dice

It has been busy this last month.  As soon as I mailed in my dossier documents to the agency I started hearing about domestic possibilities.  I mean the same day. Right - that was completely unexpected.  We even met a young woman and her mother through a video call. All in all, there were two domestic situations and two Russian and none of them were right or worked out. Not much news in the last two weeks so what do we do while we wait? We were hoping that we would be traveling to Russia soon. If no news this week maybe we'll go away for a couple of days.  

The news of the day is that I completed the first part of the dossier that I needed for the registration and it is in the mail back to the agency. Somehow each step feels like I have overcome a huge hurdle and yet we are really still inching our way toward our goal. At least we are moving forward.  Yehudah is now really encouraging and pushing me to get everything accomplished as soon as possible.  I think he's now so excited and it is really amazing.

I was so busy planning my conference that I haven't had a chance to post.  Yehudah has to redo his fingerprints for immigration but we pretty much expected that to happen. I'm hoping these fingerprints take or we will have to run a name search just like we did with the FBI clearance for the home study.

I was really confused about the documents I needed to complete for the registration part of the home study.  Now I have all the documents completed and the pictures of the house all prepared.  Yehudah repaired my mom's chair that her father made for her nearly 75 years ago.  I am so happy to see it in the house and ready to be used. But we managed to find all the furniture we needed and wall decorations and all the pictures were approved by my agency.  What a relief! Now that we have all this done we will notarize and apostille everything. Then maybe we will start to look at referrals?

A little bit of good news for today. We received our notices for fingerprinting from the Department of Homeland Security.  Let's hope our fingerprints actually read.  I don't remember if I wrote about what happened with fingerprinting for the home study, but it took months. This weekend I'm planning to do a little shopping to dress up the cribs and room and we are about ready to start taking pictures of this house for the dossier.  I feel like it's all coming together a bit and I'm getting more excited and optimistic about this actually happening.

My friends have really come through for us.  So far I have a crib and a convertible crib waiting for us to pick up.  I think we will be able to furnish the room at least for pictures.  What a tremendous relief this is!  In other really good news, I put all the paperwork together for the I-600a immigration papers and they are on their way to Dallas. Now I can actually start on the dossier.

Passover is now over, everything is put away.  I am getting back to life.  This week I had a phone meeting with the dossier coordinator at the agency.  Now I could use some help.  Seriously.  Yes there are lots of documents to get and forms to fill out.  Most of that is busy work and is manageable.  Here's what I don't know how to do.  We have to take pictures of the house, fine.  We have to take a picture of the childrens' room with furniture in it.  Since we don't have a referral why would we buy furniture when we don't know what age child we will have?  I was planning on buying furniture, especially beds at the last minute.  My thoughts so far are to get some furniture from the thrift shop and check out rentals.  If any of you have experience, how did you handle this?

I received instructions for putting together the dossier just before Passover.  There was way too much to get accomplished for holiday so I didn't even look at the email. I just opened up the zip file and I am so overwhelmed by it!  I think what worries me most is that so many of the documents are only valid for a short period of time and I worry that some will expire before I finish the rest and I will have to do them all over again.  Any advice?