Well, I mailed our Dossier in yesterday. It was the funniest thing, handing it over to the lady at FedEx, I felt a little nauseous. Thinking about all of the hours of work that went into getting all these papers from all of these different sources, and the fact that all of the originals were in this envelope... I just don't want anything getting lost or damaged in the mail! :) So, soon we will hear from our agency what number we are on the waitlist... crazy that we're at this point now! It's going faster than I realized, kind of how at your babies second birthday you look back and think "Where did the time go? How did we get here so fast?!" Yeah, that's how I'm feeling! I'm getting ready to mail in some immigration paperwork and will be SO glad to have that out of the way!

Homestudy Finalized

Well, well, well! Our homestudy was finalized today. All three copies were notarized and just waiting for me to pick them up. Now they have to be state certified, and then we can send our dossier once we get our invoice from Holt. Thomas is taking the homestudy up to the capital today to get it all certified and ready to send off. One more check on the checklist... hallelujah! Now, the next part is the part I'm not looking forward to: immigration paperwork, so be praying for me, guys!

Homestudy Approved

Our homestudy was approved by our adoption agency today. That's good news! We're working to finish up some parent training that is required for international adoption and must be completed before our dossier can be finalized. I have to admit, I'm pretty frustrated with our adoption agency, because they never told us that we needed to do this training. Our social worker had to tell us. We would have had it done months ago if we had known. I feel like our agency hasn't really helped us with anything. When we were researching agencies, I was looking for one that would do a little bit of handholding, as I was not very familiar with all the ins and outs of international adoption. It seems like we've had to figure everything out on our own, or by using the message boards, or friends or our social worker. Now, that's not to say that I don't think Holt is a great, ethical, and expediant agency. They are. I've only heard wonderful things about them, I guess I was just looking for something different from our agency. Oh well! Frustrations are sure to come and go through out this process!

Moving Along

Our social worker emailed me the draft of our homestudy last night, so we're getting there! We just found out that there is some adoption training online that we need to complete, so we're working on that. I'll keep you all updated!