USCIS Fingerprinting: Check!

On Tuesday, January 21 we spent all of 25 minutes getting fingerprinted at the USCIS Office in the Federal Building in St. Louis, MO.  The staff there was super-friendly and it was really fascinating to be sitting in a waiting room full of people of different nationalities who were waiting for their appointment.  We loved it!

My fingerprints weren't cooperating (like when I had to get fingerprinted THREE TIMES for our foster care license in 2010), so she massaged my fingers with cornhuskers lotion and tried, tried again until she got prints she thought would be acceptable.  In addition, she also did an old-fashioned ink print card as a back-up so that I (hopefully) won't get recalled.

God showed up in this fingerprinting appointment detail, too.  We were invited to come down to St. Louis on Monday night by a family who is adopting a sibling pair from the same hosting trip our guy was on.  We stayed at their home, they fed us a WONDERFUL Filipino meal (they have been learning from some Filipino co-workers), and the boys stayed with them while we went into St. Louis for our appointment on Tuesday morning.

If we had tried to drive down Tuesday morning, it would have been a different story.  The weather was bad and would have made our 2-hour trip to St. Louis very difficult, maybe impossible.  Many schools in our area and even in the St. Louis area were closed for the day.

AND SO, because school was cancelled, I didn't have to use my personal day after all.  :)

We were grateful to spend time with new friends, to make it to our appointment despite the weather, and to save a personal day off at work!

WE STILL WAIT:  On the long side, it may be the end of March before we get approval from both ICAB (Inter-Country Adoption Board in the Philippines) and from USCIS (Immigration).  If it happens sooner, we will be ready to go for the next steps to make this happen as soon as possible!

****karen