It's D Day!!

Or, more acurately, D WEEK. The D I'm talking about is DOCUMENTS. My goal for the week is to be done with all the documents for our dossier, minus our USCIS(immigration approval), and one other document that I am waiting to come in the mail.

Monday was a success. We had a stack of documents signed, notarized, and faxed off for approval(they were all approved, praise the Lord!!). My stomach was in knots the whole time we were working on the papers, but in the end, the notary only messed up on one, which is understandable when you are notarized 20-something documents.

Tuesday we went to Austin....and back. I can't complain though. The kids did amazing!! Although, Ray did have to stop to pee about 17 times on the way there alone. Poor thing. I guess that happens when you have bladder issues.

In Austin we had our state criminal background checks and fingerprinting done, and we had a mountain of papers apostilled. Then we found the closest UPS and sent new Child Specific Petitions and Power of Attorneys to Daniel's country because the batch I overnighted through the postal service STILL HAVEN'T BEEN DELIVERED. Last I tracked the one I just sent they were in Denmark and still and schedule to be delivered tomorrow.

While I didn't meet any other adopting families or Russian speaking hippies while we were at the Secretary of State's office, the lady we worked with was pretty cool. She even knew about Reece's Rainbow and said that shshe loves to look at the kiddos on the website all the time. How crazy is that?! 999 out of 1000 people have never heard of Reece's Rainbow, yet the lady at the Secretary of State's office is a big advocate for them. Amazing!


Today I had our Proof of Home Ownership document done at the County Appraisers office. I scheduled a mobile notary to meet me there. Everything went soooooo smooth. The ladies who worked in the office were very nice and helpful. They did everything just right. The notary was super nice too. Everyone did their part right and the document looks perfect. Until.....I notice that the notary's commisison expires in less than 12 months. That is a big no-no for us. All of our documents have to be notarized by a notary who's commission doesn't expire for at least 12 months. I didn't even think to ask him about that ahead of time. Oh well. Live and learn, right?

Our homestudy is complete except for one little detail. We are waiting on a document from Josh's employer. The document we got from them was done 6 kinds of wrong(yes, seriously), so now getting them to fix it(or even contact me back) is proving to be difficult. Tomorrow I think I'll try calling every hour on the hour until she gets tired of listening to my voicemails. The employment documents is important because what ever income numbers they put in the employment letter has to be the same in the homestudy. The social worker can't complete the homestudy until I get her the numbers. We can't finish our immigration paperwork(which can take a loooooong time to process) until we send them a copy of our COMPLETED homestudy. Frustrating. And confusing. And somewhat stressful(actually it is very stressful, but I'm trying to remain calm since being stressed fixes nothing.)

I'm going to run for tonight. I've got so much more that I am wanting to blog about, but our computer has been on the fritz so I've barely been able to get online the past week or so. Hopefully tomorrow I will be blogging good news tomorrow about how our paperwork was delivered to our facilitator and I got a correct employment letter from Josh's employer. A girl can dream, right?

Also, don't forget to pray about the legislative bill that will close all adoptions between Daniel's country and the United States. It is still scheduled to be voted on sometime between Dec 14-17. There is hope even when it seems hopeless. The battle belongs to the Lord.

"The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord;

he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases."

Proverbs 21:1