Saturday, March 20, 2010

Expiration dates in the adoption process

I admit that in general I pay no attention to expiration dates! I don't eat anything dairy or any canned processed foods. All of my meat is in the freezer, and my veggies tell me when they are getting old by their fuzzy factor :) Am I justifying myself, most likely!
Well, when it come to adoption, expiration dates are very important. Each adoptive family has 3 expiration dates to keep track of.
1. Your home study expires at some point. Each state is different which makes it a bit more confusing. Our state says that home studies need to be updated every 18 months. This means our home study expires on June 20th 2011.
2. The USCIS I600A expires every 18 months as well. This is our orphan processing petition. We just received a letter which was very misleading telling us that we needed to file an I-600 18 within 18 months (before September 16th 2011). This means we need to have a referral by that date. This seems pretty do-able, BUT on the top of the form it says it expires on March 16th 2011, which is 12 months away. Anyone know what this means???
3. Our fingerprints expire 15 months after they are taken. This means they expire on June 10th 2011. Why fingerprint expire every 15 months is something that NO ONE in the adoption community can figure out. It is such a random amount of time, and sadly most adoptions take longer than 15 months which means that most people get the prints knowing they will have to be re-printed again in 15 months... sad, but the law so we respect it with confusion.

I know this post might be incredibly boring, but I selfishly wrote it so I could have documentation of our dates for further reference :) If we get within a few months of these dates we will have to re-apply so please pray our sweet little one home by early May 2011 so we don't have to fret!
1. Home study 6-20-11
2. I-600 filed before 9-16-11 OR 3-16-11
3. Fingerprints 6-10-2011

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