Referral ................BUT

The e-mail waiting for us this morning said the words that we've been anxiously waiting for ....

Good morning dear one………well, I found out why they won’t answer me on the date…………apparently, you have a REFERRAL for a beautiful young lady named Gabriella!

BUT: your I 171 is expired??????????????????????

I can't believe this is happening ... we have a referral but we cannot receive any information about her because of one piece of paper ...............

Now for those of you who aren't familiar with what an I-171 is - it's the paper that tells the foreign country that you're approved to bring a child from their country into the United States. One of the most important papers there is ..... and ours expired on 2-23-09! Unbelievable!!!!

When we decided to try for a child in Bulgaria we resubmitted all our paperwork for the change, had new fingerprints done and received what we thought was our new I-171because it said we were approved to adopt a child from Bulgaria. We did not realize that the government does not extend the DATE you are allowed to do this until it's expiration date is under 90 days -- all of our paperwork was completed in August, well before the 90 day rule ............ so here we are ......... stuck AGAIN!!! Only worse ... we finally have a referral ..... a little girl (with such a pretty name) is waiting for us ........

We've already completed the papers necessary to request an extension and sent them priority mail, however, we're not sure exactly what will happen. We hope that they will honor our extension without additional fees (of course it's a very expensive fee) but they may not because technically our approval expired two weeks ago ...........

Why?????????? Why???????? Why???????????