Dossier documents are at the Chinese Consulate

Our dossier documents are at the Chinese Consulate. I got a call (the good part because now I know they arrived) that one of our documents were not apostled and needed to be redone (the bad part). They will send all the documents back when they are verified and we will have to resend the ones that were not done properly. We were ahead of schedule but this will put us back another 10 days or so. Not too bad but we are so excited about bringing Cora home that these small setbacks that I should have noticed drive me crazy! We are still one step closer and getting very excited.

We are trying to figure out how to decorate Sasha and Cora’s room, get it organized and built in a way that it will be easily accessible for Cora to reach all she will want to play with and a bed built to suit her needs. I feel like the nesting stage is kicking in and we are still a long way from bringing Cora home.

Received our approval for our I 800

We received our approval for our I 800 on Thursday. I finally feel like we are really going to get this adoption done and Cora will be home with soon. It is such a game of hurry up and wait, the waiting is the worst part for me. Friday I went to have the last few documents notarized and drove to Lansing and had them apostled/ authenticated. IT seems that I need to check our notary more close because when I got to the Secretary of State Department of the Great Seal it seems that my notary did not date a document so they refused to authenticate it. I had to find Auntie Cheryl, who happens to work in Lansing, and have her find me a notary. She walked me personally to one. We only had about 20 minutes before they closed for lunch and I do not like the “crunch time” feeling. Everything worked out so I can send the documents for my dossier off to the Chinese Consulate. They need to have all of our original documents plus copies of each. I am so scared that something is going to happen during delivery (like they get lost) and I will have to start collecting documents again. We only have until December 9, 2012 to get all documents to China and I do not think there is any way to get that done. Everything has gone smooth so far so I know that my worry is not doing me any good, things always work out.

 

I hope to have the documents in the mail and on their way to the Chinese Consulate on Monday, three days to get there and checked in, ten days for them to return to us, and then we will be sending our Dossier to China! Everything is moving along at a good pace so I recalculated our “hope to travel date” to being the end of February instead of April (of cource I can always be wrong).  I will try to keep up with adjusting the date as we complete a new step towards bringing Cora home.

 

USCIS biometrics appointment

Drove to Detroit today for our USCIS biometrics appointment, this is just getting fingerprinted. We got up at 5:30 to get ready and woke up Rey and Max to get them ready for school. They both rode the bus and this is new for them in the morning. After they were up and moving we got Sasha up. She did really well for getting up almost 2 hours early. Everyone was ready for the bus and we only left about 10 minutes late. Sasha rode with us because the bus would not be by to get her for another hour and we would never make our appointment. Two hours later we arrived, walked in to an almost empty building, filled out a short form, were first in line, got fingerprinted and were out the door. The whole process took maybe 10 minutes.

We were very close to Comerica Park (Tigers Baseball Team) so we decided to stop by and take some pictures. It is very cool!

After we dropped Sasha off at school we decided to go and see a movie. Shawn picked one that he took the children to. It was The Odd Life of Timothy Green. It was very good but hard to watch. It is a movie about a couple who wants to have children and cannot. They went through the process to have a miracle happen, literally. I do not want to ruin the ending so all I can say is that it touched our hearts and lives in many ways. The ending really opened our eyes. It seemed like this movie was talking to us and letting us know we are doing the right thing. We were talking about the movie and our adoption and Shawn looked down to find a leaf very similar to the one in the movie. It spoke volumes to us. We saved it and it will go in Cora’s book with a copy of the story as to why it is so special. You need to see the movie to understand.

Next step will be sending our documents for authentication of our documents from the Chinese Consulate.  It will be so hard to put our only original documents in the mail and hope they make it there and back to us safely.