In all things adoption, this is a very stressful week.

First off, our court date is on this Friday, December 21. That means if all goes well, Solomon Tsega will officially be our son! It also means that if all does not go well, all of the excitement and anxiety that have been building up towards this day for almost a month now will crash and burn, and we will likely have to suffer through another two to four weeks of agonizing waiting before we make any progress.

Our agency has assured us that they have gone through our paperwork and Solomon's paperwork and that as far as they can tell everything is in order and is correct, although you just never know what the courts may ask for.

All of that is stressful enough, but then we are having drama with USCIS as well. We filed our I600A back at the end of August, and our homestudy was sent in and our fingerprints were done before the end of September. We have waited since then without any sign of our I171H.

Last week I found out that USCIS is no longer emailing the I171H approvals to the embassies as they were last year, but they are now mailing hard copies, which have to go from the local USCIS office to the National Visa Center and then on to the embassy you are adopting from, which is currently taking approximately 3-5 weeks.

A couple of weeks ago, our agency had given us a tentative embassy date of Jan. 16 (hinging on us passing court on Friday). We have plane tickets booked for us and for my parents, we have babysitters set up and we have hotel reservations made.

However, if it now looking highly unlikely that we will be able to travel as planned even if we do pass court, because of this whole mess with USCIS.

Our Senator's office has graciously been helping us, and it turns out the huge delay with USCIS is that they have decided they want things worded very particularly. Through our Senator's office we finally found out that the new officer in charge at our USCIS office feels that part of our homestudy is "insufficient" (even though it is virtually the same exact homestudy that has been approved multiple times already for our other adoptions), and our social worker is currently rewriting a paragraph that has all of the information that they wanted, just not worded in the exact "right way". Can I say how frustrating it is to be hung up on a technicality?

Our social worker is getting it done today and will send it on to USCIS, and we are hoping and praying that they will get our approval done this week before the holidays hit and slow things down even more.

We were really hoping for the Jan. 16 embassy date, as it would get us home before our son Ryan's birthday on Jan. 30. I know he will "understand" if I miss his birthday, but is there anything worse than mom guilt??

If all goes well, we will have another son and USCIS approval at the end of this week (which would be good for all of you readers as well, because I could finally share pictures of Solomon's perfect little face with you!) If all doesn't go well, we will have to come up with a "plan B".

Adoption stress is no fun. I know that in a month or two (please don't let it be three) that we will have Solomon with us and all the stress will be behind us and well worth it, but at this point in time, it is no fun at all.