DELIVERED!!!

The tracking status for our dossier officially says "Delivered"!  All those pages that represent all those hours of work have made their way safely across the ocean a whole day early!  (If you ever have to send something incredibly valuable halfway around the world, I totally recommend FedEx.  Their tracking is awesome - I got to watch our package hop around Europe - and they have gotten both of our packages to their destination at least one day early.  Our first package was actually four days early.)

So...what happens next?  Nina, our amazing facilitator, has to take our documents and her translation of our documents to be notarized.  (Yes, hard as it is to believe, they actually want one more signature and stamp on our paperwork.)  She is hoping to do that tomorrow.  After that, we can be submitted to the government agency that handles adoptions in our country (the SDA).  That can only happen on a Thursday.  Because our package arrived a day early, Nina is hoping to submit our documents this Thursday!!!  


After we are submitted, we wait for a letter from the SDA giving us a date to visit their office for our "adoption appointment".  (I'm sure there's an official term for that appointment, but I don't know it! :)  Our appointment will probably be 1-2 months from our submission date.  So...if everything goes as planned (which would be amazing but not necessarily likely), we should be traveling sometime in July or August.  I'll share more details later, but we would probably bring our little ones home about five weeks after our appointment.


It's so exciting to have taken another step in this process!  Thanks for your prayers.  We will soon be able to consider specific children, so please keep that in your prayers.  We are so excited to "meet" the little ones God has for our family.  (When I took our paperwork to the state capital the other day, Emma asked if I was bringing back her brothers and/or sisters.  Then she informed me that she "wants a sister first".)

Alright...back to my yard projects.  I am finally tackling a corner of our yard that has desperately needed to be landscaped since we moved in (ummmm...four-and-a-half years ago).  I am tearing out grass and weeds, and Emma is collecting her own personal earthworm and roly-poly zoo in a yogurt container.  She's quite the zookeeper, and I think most of her charges are actually making it back into the dirt alive - except for ones she thought were thirsty and needed the whole yogurt container filled with water to drink.  Oops!


I am thankful to be out in the sunshine (even if I am pulling weeds).  I hope the sun is shining where you are!  Thanks for taking the time to be a part of our crazy life.