If you’ve been following our adoption story this time around, you’ve seen that God’s hands were ALL OVER our matching process. He asked us to #doitscared and scared we did it. There are many pieces that followed that yes. Pieces that brought us to tears. That made us stand in awe of his faithfulness. Those are the pieces I’ve yet to share publicly how big of a deal they were.

Let me start with this image. This is roughly the process we followed with Adelyn. We signed our first piece of paper the last day of February 2016. We brought Adelyn home May 12, 2017. Roughly 14 months from start to finish. With Ansley we signed the very first paper to start the very last day in September 2018. We are leaving June 13, 2019 to go appear in court. We anticipate we will be home by the end of July. That will put our process at around 10 Months start to finish. How? Only God.

Let’s start with CARA approval. Approval was taking families identical to ours around 6 months at the time we were approved. We were approved at 5 weeks. If we were approved even one week later we most likely would have missed our match with Ansley. Possibly even a day later.

The site to match families went down after we found Ansley on Reece’s Rainbow. I had the luxury of being home and alerting my coordinator the moment the site went back up to match us. Our coordinator was checking her phone constantly (at a time India is not normally updating). This isn’t common with agencies.

We had to wait on home-study and i800a update. Everything should have halted in our process until these were updated. Guess what? Nothing stopped moving on the India side.

Our originals were on their way from India. It usually takes around 4 weeks, but sometimes can drag on for months at a time. We were waiting on an email with a CWC letter at the same time. You need these documents to apply for i800, but I wasn’t really worried because we didn’t have i800a. Nothing should have been happening while we waited.

Then things started happening… crazy things….out of the BLUE when our coordinator inquired about our originals we were awarded NOC! NOC is a HUGE deal. It is the document that says the Indian government has no objection to us adopting Ansley. It meant we could try to send a family book (failed haha). It meant we could tell people with more confidence our family was growing. It was a huge win!! This was another document that had been taking families 6 months. We didn’t even apply, and we were awarded. We didn’t have all the required paperwork, they just made a clause that said the NOC was contingent on us receiving those.

So that’s enough to just stand in awe of all God did right? Well he wasn’t done.

At the point we’re STILL waiting on i800a approval. A step that should have been taken care of months ago, but we keep getting stuck.

Then out of NO WHERE we get our court petition. In Hyderabad, where Ansley lives, we have to send a court petition that is notarized to get our court date. This normally is triggered by NOC and since we had NOC the orphanage lawyer started working on it!! We never expected this.

Then it FINALLY CAME! I800a approval. We rushed and got our i800 paperwork in right away! It went ok and we got our approval back right around the time our court petition made it safely to India.

So now we just need ds260 email and article 5 to come and then we can be filed in court. Well that’s what we thought….3 days later however came the email. “You have a court date for a little over a month from now! We are going to confirm you can keep the date as long as your article 5 comes in time.” Guys we had a court date before we finished the step we needed to do before NOC! 7 days later we had Article 5 and started booking our plane tickets!

So in summary it actually went like this:

11-1-18 registered with CARA

11-8-18 mailing i800a pack

12-7-18 biometrics i800a

12-7-18 CARA approval

1-8-19 matched

1-18-19: i800a approval

1-23-19 match accepted

2-12-19 i800a supplement mailed

3-18-19 RFE received

3-12-19 NOC!

4-5-19 supplement approved

4-11-19 supplement in mail

4-10-19 court petition recieved

4-17-19 i800 mailed

5-10-19 i800 approval in the mail

5-6-19 court petition arrived India

5-13-19 informed of court date

5-15-19 ds260 numbers

5-20-19 article 5

We spent so much time upset about our i800a battle and felt defeated. But God had gone before us and fought the battles before we even knew. We sang a new song at church yesterday. “Our God is Awesome”. And boy is he, he is awe inspiring every step of this process. As my sweet friend Kelly says,”God finishes well, he always finishes what he begins in us”. I never could have imagined how he would finish this one.