bodner001

Dear Family and Friends, Today is a very special day.  We are celebrating our 13th wedding anniversary, and we are so thankful God brought us together!  On our 10th anniversary, we began discussing adoption.  Our dream is coming true. We would like to introduce you now to our three precious children, Angie, Ingrid, and Juan.  We will be adopting them in Colombia in just a few short weeks!!   Angie - Age 10   Ingrid - Age 8   Juan - Age 6 As we look at our children's pictures, pray over their health, safety, and happiness, we are thankful that God has given us these children to love and to raise.  We recently saw this poem that touched our hearts, and wanted to share it now with you.  It is called KISSES IN THE WIND: The Waiting Child's Lullab y .   When we finished reading it, all we could think about is "We are coming!" KISSES IN THE WIND: The Waiting Child's Lullab y I hold you in my...

Now that we have received our I-800 approval in the mail, we are faxing the USCIS approval, along with a form called the DS-230, to the US Embassy in Colombia today.  The DS-230 is an application for each child to get their Visa.  It will take about a week to process everything there, and then the US Embassy will issue a letter called the Article 5.  The Article 5 will then be sent to Ayudame, and they will set our travel dates! Also, we had the opportunity to have our travel call with our agency this morning.  We went over the specific details of our adoption process while we are in Colombia.  She answered a lot of our questions, and we are really excited!

Our adoption continues to move at lightning speed, and God has opened up many doors.  It is hard to believe we were just matched with our kids on December 16th!  So, this is a small recap of all that has happened in just two short weeks.  Our agency submitted our I-800 to US Immigration on Tuesday, March 8th.  We received an e-mail confirmation from them on Friday, March 11th, to let us know they had received all of our forms.  We received our physical receipt in the mail from  USCIS saying that our I-800 was being processed on Monday, March 14th.  We then received a call from the Immigration Officer that is processing our case this past Friday, March 18th.  She said she had just received our applications and was processing them now.  We learned today that she had approved our I-800, and it should be on their way to us, via USPS 2 Day Air.  We are getting closer and closer!  Thank you so much for sharing our exciteme...

A friend of ours, who is also working with our agency, was recently in Bogota for their adoption.  Here are a few pictures of Ayudame orphanage.  We will probably go to Ayudame to meet the director of the orphanage and be presented with our kids.  It is wonderful to picture where we will be going and are so excited!  Our documents are in process at US Imigration, and it will be time to travel before we know it! 

Today, we received three documents from Homeland Security.  These documents are called an I-797C, Notice of Action, and we received one letter for each child.  The I-797C is the official receipt from US Immigration regarding our I-800 approval.  Although we had received the e-mail confirmation on Friday that our I-800 was in process, we are very excited to get these official documents.  They came a lot quicker than we thought they would!  We hope we will have the approval of our I-800 in the next week or two.  Meanwhile, we are busy getting our paper work ready to send to the US Embassy in Colombia and our Visa applications.  We are so excited that things continue to move smoothly as all of our paper work is processed.