Almost there!

Yesterday I came home to find a FedEx bag from our Washington DC courier at the front door. All our documents had been certified by the State Department and the Chinese Embassy!!! We were most impressed that our documents had been personally signed by Hillary R. Clinton!

So, last night we made more copies of everything and today we will send it all off to our agency in Oregon and then wait for our match! Praise the Lord! Melia's homecoming may be here sooner than we ever dreamed.

Off to D.C.

All the papers were state certified!! They have been mailed to Washington D.C. and now we wait (hopefully not more than 3 weeks) to get them back!!

Meanwhile, we are getting very excited around here about a new sister and daughter. Hallie is writing books and journals dedicated to her sister and telling all her classmates about the process.

Jacob has also shared about Melia at school and one of his classmate's Mom called me for advice because they are also starting a Chinese adoption!

We are holding the hope of Melia in our hearts as we wait. Praise God for the process and how is changes us for good!

State Certification

We are getting dangerously close to an approved Dossier!!

We have collected all the necessary documents and headed down to Lincoln today to have them State Certified at the Capitol. Unfortunately, not all the documents had an attestation clause and so I had to have the notaries in Omaha (three different ones) resign the documents in the presence of the person who originally signed the documents. Ugh!

I have done this before so you think I would have done it all correctly the first time, but no!

The good news is that all the notaries and signers were available today and were kind enough to get everything signed appropriately (I think). So, tomorrow I will try again.

If I succeed, and that's a big if, then my next step is to mail our documents to a courier who will deliver them to the US State Department and the Chinese Embassy.

I'll let you know tomorrow if I was successful...

Some News

On April 8th Hannah, Ryan and I got our FBI fingerprints taken at the Department of Homeland Security Office here in Omaha. We knew it would take 1-7 weeks to get our I-797 back from the government.

So, we have been getting all our other dossier paperwork together so when the 797 comes in we can keep this adoption moving forward.

Well, we got a call today from someone at a government office saying our 797 was approved and that they sent it to us but it got returned as undeliverable address.

Seriously! They are supposed to know everything about us so that we are worthy of adopting a child (we already adopted one) and they don't know where we live or how to get a letter to us!

Really, I am not bitter! I just find it a bit comical!

Anyway, they fixed the address and it is on it's way to us! It should be here tomorrow or Wednesday.

Then , I will be off to Lincoln for State Certification and all the while calling a courier service in Washington D.C. to deliver our documents to the US State Department and then the Chinese Embassy! This is getting exciting!!!

We love our Melia!