By the end it turned out that we were waaaaay overprepared. We did our final preparations last night, the only thing we were worried about were those 3 months that we didn't live together after we got married so my husband even printed out a calendar and made references to receipts for every single weekend that he went to visit me while I was up in school.
Our interview was at 9 but we got there at 8. They didn't take us in till 9:30 but that wasn't bad I don't think. We got this really nice officer. He first asked us to swear in before we even sat down. Then he said he was gonna go over the forms to make sure all the info that they have was correct. He noticed we had a change of address so he crossed out our old address from every form and wrote the current one. He said that that was very important so I would get any future documents they might send. He asked the typical questions "have you ever..." but he skipped a bunch. He went over the biographic info and I told him that everything was correct, then he said that I'm a student and I told him that I graduated last May so he crossed that out and put Engineer instead. He made a joke saying that now the flow of money is coming in instead of out. He asked for my passport, I-94 and the EAD, I gave him my new passport and my expired one since my student visa was there. I don't even think he checked my visa, or asked for my I-20 or anything. Oh the only think that was missing (even though we sent it TWICE) was my husband's letter of employment, so we gave it to him...again. Then he said he's required to ask for any proof of the relationship so we gave him the lease and our joing bank account statements. Then my husband told me to show him some pictures too so we gave him some pictures from our trip to the Dominican Republic last year, he said that he needs to put that in his list of countries to visit because it looks very beautiful. He didn't even keep the pictures. Then my husband asked him how long it should take for us to receive the GC or if we should apply for an AP since we want to fly home to have our Catholic wedding. He asked when we needed to leave and we told him that on December so he asked if late July sounded OK. At that point I realized we were approved!!! He stamped my passport and wished us good luck. Oh and he told us about the 2-year conditional residency law. That stamp looks so pretty. Hopefully in 3 weeks or so I'll receive they actual card.
Overall I would say the process wasn't bad for us. We seriously expected to have to wait for at least a year, it turned out to be half that much. A laywer we talked to said even 18 months. Oh and about lawyers.... we saw a bunch of lawyers when we were waiting and they were running from client to client. One of them was even asking the couple if they had made photocopies of everything (they hadn't) ...AT THE INTERVIEW!!! Just not worth it!
Goodluck everyone!!!
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