Another Delay/ New Submission Date

We have a new submission date – April 13th.  I thought we might get our immigration approval this week, but we ran into another problem.  I know that in a previous post about our Home Visit, I told about Jody being arrested.  You can read the story here or I will just summarize and tell you that he was arrested in 2002.  He didn’t pay a ticket on time and got pulled over again the day after it was due and there was already a warrant out for his arrest.  We didn’t think it would show up on his background check but we thought we should mention it to the social worker just in case.  So she wrote about it in our Home Study.  It didn’t show up on any of the background checks we have had during this process (3 total, I think).  The officer working on our case at the Department of Homeland Security emailed me yesterday telling me that we needed a court deposition and a written statement from Jody about the incident.  She said that she forgot to tell us that she needed that when she requested the corrections to the Home Study.  So, Jody had to go to the town where he was arrested and try to get a certified court deposition.  There is no record of the incident at all so they gave him a statement saying that.  He had to write a statement about what happened and what he learned from it which was not as easy as you might think – lots of sarcasm to weed out.  He had to have it notarized and then mail both documents to USCIS.  I am thankful that this time the officer let us know what we needed by email.  We didn’t have time to wait for correspondence in the regular mail.  Hopefully everything else is correct and we will receive our I-171h next week.  I need to get it by Thursday so that I can go to Austin to have it apostilled and so that it can make it to Ukraine by the 13th.  From our experience so far, this seems highly unlikely.  This 3 or 4 week delay has been so odd that I keep thinking that God wants us to stall for some reason.  His timing is perfect, I know.  But we sure are anxious to have our girl here with us.  I was hoping to have the whole summer for her to adjust and work on her English and then we could make a better decision about what to do about school in the fall.   Each day that goes by is another day in an orphanage for her – one more day without a family.  Oh, I just can’t wait to get her here!