Fix....

I just got an e-mail with 4 dossier documents that I have to fix, urg! Oh well, this is why I sent it off ahead of time so I have time to fix it before my I-171h gets back. These are the things that need to be fixed...
1. New bank statement, this one didn't have our savings on it.
2. Redo one letter of rec., didn't have the same date as notary.
3. Redo letter of intent, didn't include enough information.
4. Make sure our birth certificates are state sealed.

I will get all of these done this week and then send them off to get State Sealed, so they will be back in plenty of time before our I-171h. Exciting update eh?

Today...

I am quite impatient. It has only been 3 weeks since we got our fingerprints and I know that the estimated wait is 5-12 weeks and closer to 12, but everyday I find myself checking the mail in hopes that for some reason ours was just really easy to process so we got them back in record time. No such luck. Oh well, I am hoping for beginning of August and then hopefully we will have our dossier to Ethiopia before September. On another note or maybe the same note, my friend Kellie did get her I-171h back today, Yeah!! I think hers took about 9-10 weeks so that is probably about how long we will wait.

I think I am feeling so anxious because I have been following the blogs of some fellow Bethany families that have recently received their referrals. I am so excited for these families, and it just makes everything seem more real. Through this whole process I have struggled with feeling like this isn't really going to happen. Seeing other families reach this point and talk about traveling to pick up their little ones makes it feel so real. I am getting more and more excited and anxious.

I received some sad news this week that our wonderful social worker is leaving. I am so sad and I will really miss her. She was always so great, she never seemed annoyed with my millions of questions. I am sad also to not be able to share the really exciting part of this journey with her, but I want to keep in touch with her so that we can share our joy with her.

I would also like to ask anyone that would like to pray for my blog friend Sharon to go visit her blog and read about how you can pray for her. Even if you choose not to fast please just say a prayer for her.

Family Day

Yesterday was such a fun family day. It was one of the first days in forever that Kevin was home for a whole day with no other commitments, so we made the best of it. We started the day off by having breakfast together, then we went to a park in town, the America the Beautiful Park. This park has a really cool fountain that the kids could play in. We stayed at the water part for a couple hours and ate lunch and then we headed to the playground area to play some more. This wore us all out so we then went home and napped for a couple of hours. After our naps we went back downtown to another park for Spring Spree. This is a festival that we have every year with vendors and entertainment. We went and ate brats, sweet corn, and of course cotton candy. For some reason I had a stomach ache for the rest of the night. We then went to hear our friend Mindy play her bassoon in the Little London Winds. The sounded great and it was a great way to end our family day.

That day I also got all of dossier documents back with the State Seal on them. It only took about a week. I am a little worried that some of them were not done right though. The documents that were multiple pages have the state seal stapled to the last page in the middle of the document. I am not sure if this is acceptable. I am going to e-mail my social worker tomorrow to ask her. I really hope they are okay, if not I have a lot of work to do. I then want to send all of our documents to our social worker to make sure everything is done correctly before our I-171h gets back. I think we still have another possible 10 weeks to wait for this so I want to take this time to make sure that everything else is done right. Hopefully I will be sending my dossier off in at least 10 weeks.

Finally, here are some pictures of our deck. I have no pictures of our fun family day because I forgot our camera, surprise, surprise.

Being Private & Other Updates

We are officially private! Kevin and I talked a lot and decided that we wanted to make our blog private after we received new blog guidelines for our blog from our adoption agency. There were so many things that they wanted us to be careful not to write because people have actually had their adoptions suspended because of something they have written on their blog. While I am really careful about what I write I am just unsure of what may change and become a problem in the future, so I just wanted to be safe. Another reason was that we had some pretty nasty comments left by an anonymous commenter that were borderline threatening. This made us very aware that we don't know who is reading our blog and looking at pictures of our children, so we wanted to at least know who is looking in on our lives. So welcome, we are glad you are here.

As far as adoption updates... on Friday I sent all of our dossier documents to Denver to be state sealed. I wanted to get them done early so that I can then give them to our social worker and have her look everything over to make sure everything was done correctly. I think we still have a 3 to 10 week wait for our I-171h but I wanted to make sure all of our dossier paperwork was done so that when that comes back we will be ready to send our dossier off. Fun stuff!

A non-adoption update... we redid our deck this weekend! I am so happy about this because our deck was in terrible shape. When we moved into this house it was beyond sanding and staining to get this deck in good shape, so we saved our stimulus check and with the help of a very dear friend we were able to by composite decking!!! On Saturday we had a bunch of friends come over to help us rebuild our deck. Thank God for all of our friends that could come and help us. We are so blessed with such incredible friends! I got a few pictures of the rebuild, but I do not have a final picture because we were short six boards so it is not quite finished, but I will post a picture after we are completely done. Here are some pictures of us working hard on Saturday.
Okay, never mind, I will post pictures later. I tried twice and it kept having errors so I will try again later.

Going Private

I have thought and thought a lot about this and I have decided to make my blog private. I have really enjoyed meeting fellow adoptive parents and would still like to maintain those relationships and of course we want our family and friends to be able to follow our journey still, so please leave me a comment with your e-mail address if you would like to be added to the list readers.

Fingerprints!!!

Yesterday we went to the immigration office in Denver to get our fingerprints. Yeah! I was worried that it was going to take forever and be very complicated but it was so easy. We walked in, filled out a form, got our prints done, and left. It feels good to have these done. This is our last big step and wait until we can send our dossier to Ethiopia. The estimated wait that we were given was 5 to 12 weeks until we have it back and can send our stuff off. I am hoping that this wait is similar to our FBI fingerprint wait, we were estimated 2 to 4 months and they came back in 1.5 months. So hopefully this wait will be on the shorter end also. Yeah for another step closer!!