Thank you, Immigration office.

      Don't you just love how quickly & efficiently our government offices process paperwork? We submitted our homestudy to the immigration office back mid January. By January 24th we received a letter stating that we had forgotten to send in payment to get our fingerprints done (which, by the way, we had done a year ago but they don't count). So, wanting to get this process done as fast as possible, we quickly go to Publix, get a money order (because that's the only thing they accept), and send it off. By February 4th we have received a receipt. Pretty impressive, right? This week Justin got a voicemail left by a lady from immigration asking if we are going to send our payment in because our time window to submit the payment is up. Um, what? Finally after playing phone tag for 3 days, he is able to talk with her. " Immigration lady: No, Mr. V we don't have record of any payment." Justin: "I'm looking at a receipt that your office sent me, it is dated 2/4 and it states we have paid everything in full and we are just waiting on your office to send us an appointment time to get our fingerprints done." Immigration lady: "You have a receipt from our office? Can you fax me a copy of it? I have no record of any payment. Receipts are done by another person in our office and it was not updated in our office." Awesome. Did I mention that as soon as they find something missing they stop looking at your homestudy until they receive it? So our homestudy has been sitting there for the past month with no one looking at it.
     Oh, and then 30 minutes later we got an email from our family coordinator at AWAA saying she is leaving AWAA and taking another job in Florida. While we are happy for her, she is the one that has given preliminary approval for all of our dossier documents and as soon as immigration finishes, our family coordinator will look everything over and give the final stamp of approval for the completed dossier. Now that she is leaving, that's a completely different person instead of one person who's already seen everything. I wish our AWAA FC the best and hope she and her family are very happy in the next phase in their lives. I just wish she was leaving AFTER our DTE instead of before, selfish I know.
      I know patience is necessary and God never promised any of this would be easy. It's just so frustrating when people (ie. the immigration office) don't do their jobs correctly. I mean really? Because someone didn't do an interoffice mailing of the receipt our homestudy review is going to take an extra month??? Hopefully we'll have Little E by 2012...