Yet another quick update?

I am keeping to my one post a week, but just barely. :)  I was successful on Friday.  I actually made it to my last destination 2.5 hours early.  As of today, my entire dossier is complete, except for USCIS approval.  I hope that I can send it off to Landia this week or next.  I am also praying that my appointment for my USCIS fingerprint session will be in the mail tomorrow.  Things have been moving fast, but from here there will be a lot of waiting.    For now I can just be happy that I have a whole bunch of these gold stickers:

Another quick update

On Friday, I got my I-800a application sent out to Texas, my passport renewal to Pennsylvania, and copies of my birth certificate to Illinois.  They all arrived at their destinations on Tuesday.  I got my birth certificates back today with the required seals.  I don't have any information about the other items except that they arrived at their destinations.  I am trying to be patient.  Tomorrow I am taking off work and I have grand plans to visit four different cities in my state.  Without calculating the time at each location it will take me three hours just to drive to the five different stops that I need to make.  My goal is to leave at 8 am tomorrow.  If each stop takes an hour, I will be able to accomplish everything with 2 hours to spare, because I have to be at the last destination at 5 pm.  I'll let you know how this paperwork chase goes.

Quick update

I got my copies of the home study!  This means that I can ship off the I800a form for approval to adopt from the USCIS.  I am praying that this is a quick turn around.  I'm getting impatient.

My Big News

I am adopting!  I started the process to adopt from an Eastern European country (referred to as Landia in this blog) this summer.  I was told that my homestudy would be finalized today, which is what I was waiting for the news to no longer be a somewhat secret.

I have known since I was a child that I would adopt one day from a former Soviet country and it is crazy to think that I am very close to making that dream happen.  I have had quite a few people ask me why now and my answer is usually something along the lines of why not now.  Basically I know that I am still on the younger side and single, but I have the space, I have a stable good income, and I have a fantastic support system.  The later three are much more important to me than the first two in order to start this process.  I also don't like deferring dreams for things that aren't mandatory.

From here the timeline is vague, but as soon as I have my finalized homestudy in hand, I get to ship it out to get approval from USCIS to adopt.  This approval takes about 8 weeks.  Then I ship that approval and a whole bunch of other paperwork (in triplicate) to Landia for translation and submission.  That process takes a month.  After that a referral could come immediately or six months later or really anytime.  I have approximately a month between accepting the referral and my first trip to Landia.  That trip will take about a month and I will possibly bring the child(ren) back to the US to be hosted with me until the adoption is finalized on the third trip, which happens 5-6 months after the first trip.  The second trip is a quick trip for a court hearing that in this case the child(ren) do not need to attend.  And of course throughout the whole process there is a lot of paperwork :)

I will cover why the country that I chose and put up a page on the timeline up to this point later, but I have places to be and paperwork to fill out.

New Job

This isn't my big news, but it is big news!  I decided right at the end of last year to pursue a new position at my current organization.  This has been a long time coming, but was a very hard decision to make.  I have worked at the same place building up the library from ruins to a functional space for almost five years.  I am very attached to the library and to my co-workers and am very sad to be leaving it.

The library shortly after I started working there.

However, I have had a very poor working relationship with my first and second line supervisors for a long time and it had only been deteriorating.  This summer I reached my breaking point and I decided that I needed to do something about changing my situation.  I had some conversations with others that I knew in the building to let them know that I was looking for a new job and to feel out the possibilities.  I also had very candid conversations with my middle management to determine if there was any way that things could change whether to improve the current situation or change my supervisor.  At that time, I thought that one of those was a possibility, so I asked to do a three month rotation to help make the necessary changes while I was out of the immediate position.

For the past two months, I have been working for the head of the agency working on a special project.  It sounds very fancy, but really it isn't.  A couple of weeks ago I had a conversation with my middle management to determine if any changes were going to happen and I also mentioned that I had an unofficial job offer working for the office that I had been working with while on rotation.  She told me that I should take the new job because the changes wouldn't happen in time and I shouldn't make myself miserable waiting for them.  That very day I went back to the office that had offered me the position and told them that we should start things moving.  Last week, I had a conversation with my direct supervisors and told them that I wouldn't be coming back from my rotation as I had a job offer.  Their response was basically how soon can it be done so that we can hire your replacement.  Thus it looks like I will be starting the new job in February.

When I told my sister that I had got a new job, she told me that I didn't know how lucky I was to have gotten a job without applying and without an interview.  The way that I see it though, I had a six month long interview.  

I am really excited because the new job has more flexibility with working hours and telework, which will be useful for my other big news.

Happy New Year/Blog!

For me, 2014 was a year of big decisions/changes and it looks like several of those decisions will be coming to fulfillment in 2015. I am usually opposed to New Year resolutions, but this year I am going to make an exception and publicly commit to blogging at least once a week over the coming year. I hope that next week I will be at the point where I can reveal my biggest decision and how I came to make it. So, come back then for my big news, although I suspect that most people who will read this next week will be people that already know my news. :)

Now some background as to who I am; I am a Millennial living and working in the Washington, DC area for the federal government as a librarian. That really doesn't give much information, but I think that I would rather gradually reveal who I am than simply tell you in the first post. I will tell you that this blog gets its title from 2 Corinthians 9:6 "The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully." This is a fervent wish of mine to be someone who sows bountifully rather than sparingly. I want to live a full and complete life in a manner that is true to who I am and that I don't settle for the easy when the beautiful is possible.

I will leave it at that and hope that the one (if I am lucky) person that reads this will come back next week because it is so much easier for me to write for an audience than just to myself, which is why I have never enjoyed journaling.