Home Study approved!

As many of my close friends and family know, my mother has been very sick lately. Over the weekend, I drove to West Tennessee to spend time with her and help take care of her. Thankfully, she is doing better now, but while I was at my mother's house, I was without Internet access...no e-mail, no facebook, no blogger. Anyone who knows me realizes that this type of disconnection from my favorites sources of news and communication would be very hard for me :)

I spent my free time reading adoption materials and fretting over why our home study had not been approved. However, on my arrival home, I found an e-mail from our case worker at our agency saying that our home study had been approved and that we would receive our notarized copies soon in the mail. On Tuesday, the copies arrived! With our approved home study, Rob and I are now able to send off our USCIS paperwork (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) and continue working in earnest to finish our Bulgarian dossier.

One of Rob's brothers, who is a police officer, also met us at the police station last Friday to help us with our finger printing required for our FBI clearance. That packet will be sent by express mail to the FBI office tomorrow and then....we wait. Our agency has informed us that the FBI clearance is now taking a minimum of 13 weeks compared to the previous minimum of six weeks. Too bad Rob's brother can't help expedite the processing of our clearance.

Rob and I are also finishing up our second round of adoption training by our agency, which has consisted of lessons and questionnaires delivered by e-mail, in addition to two training sessions held at the agency. We should receive our certificate for this training sometime next week, but until that time, I continue to immerse myself in books on adoption and books on Bulgaria.

Speaking of Bulgaria, I did make a great find yesterday in Nashville. Off of Thompson Lane near 100 Oaks, there is a Russian and Eastern European market called Aleksey's. I went there hoping to find anything from Bulgaria, and I was blessed with a purchase of a pound of kashkaval made in Vitosha, Bulgaria. I can't wait to try this cheese over the weekend. The market also had Bulgarian feta which I intend on using in a Bulgarian recipe sent to me by a friend. I will let you know how this turns out. I am also in the market for a Bulgarian cookbook as I would like to learn how to make dishes that are familiar to my son. Wish me luck!

My next step is try and learn as much Bulgarian as I can by the fall. Luckily, I have found a place online to take lessons and practice my skills since Rosetta Stone does not offer a course in Bulgarian. I am hoping to learn as many common place words and phrases that I can in order to talk to my son even though we will have a translator on our trip. On the other side of the language issue, Julia wants me to purchase "Your Baby Can Read" every time she sees it on television because she is convinced that this would help her little brother to learn English. She is so sweet and convincing in her argument that I may end up buying it. It can't hurt.