First, let me say that it is COLD here! Not quite cold enough so that I couldn't go to the mailbox in my t-shirt...but cold enough that we slept with the heat on last night! I love it!

Now -- to the meat of these musings. It's interesting how I've had pretty regular updates these days. In one of my last comments, Carla mentioned that soon all our work will be done, our paperwork will be completely out of our hands, and truly in God's care. So...once that happens, it'll be interesting to see how regular my updates are, since we won't be the ones who actually have to do much in the processing area.

Anyway, I really did sign on this morning with a purpose...remember about a month ago, when I had a panic attack about the number of children on our homestudy not matching our CIS application? Amy ended up rushing an addendum thru DHR, and on Sept. 21, it was forwarded to the USCIS Adoption Unit in Atlanta. Well after this whole week of being unsettled & just getting overall antsy, I said a prayer on Friday to let me have some peace...I really wanted a letter in the mail from USCIS, but if I couldn't have that, then at least some peace, so I could quit worrying.

When I got home yesterday, I guess both parts of my prayer had been answered! We had a letter in the mail w/ Return Address from Dept. of Homeland Security! However, it was not our 171H...it was a letter telling us our error (that we noticed & tried to fix over a month ago). So evidently our homestudy addendum did NOT catch up to our I-600A application quickly enough. The letter we received said to send an addendum OR a signed letter stating that we wanted to change the number of kids we wanted to adopt. I called Amy and she said just to send a letter to them, stating that our homestudy addendum should be in their office. She also said that they can be pretty quick about changing things...so I guess now, we just need to pray that they are quick about this.

I had a worry session about that last night, when Nathan finally said, "Melissa, we've been worrying this whole week about the status of our application...we haven't heard and that has frustrated us. Now we've heard, we know what the status is, and we know what we've gotta do to fix it. We will send the letter in the morning, and will have done all we can do. No need in worrying anymore about it."

I guess prayers get answered in all sorts of ways. I now have my peace.

So this morning, I got up (refreshed from an actual good amount of sleep), wrote our letter, went online to USPS, bought some Priority Mail postage w/ free Delivery Confirmation(don't you LOVE what is available on the internet these days?!), and now our letter is currently waiting to be whisked away to Atlanta.

So...there is our current status. Just keep praying for us, if you have a moment, that this will be processed quickly and we can get this stuff into and right back out of our hands! I'm ready for someone else to have full control!!! ;)

Hopefully I'll have a good update soon....till then, Love to you All!