Thanksgiving

I want to wish everyone a very Happy Thanksgiving.

Today starts our week of travels. Well it's not really a week but we will not be home again until Sunday. Today we are going to my parents house, then tomorrow we will be driving to Tracy's moms house(which is 2 hours from my parents house) to have Thanksgiving dinner at 1 then back to friends house to have dinner with my family and friends by 4. On Friday my mom and I brave the lines and go shopping. It had become a tradition for us to get up early (we are not part of the crazy people that get in a line at 4:30 am just to be the first person in the store early to us is leaving the house from 7- 8) of course we have to stop for coffee and a bagel and then its off to the mall. Although this year my mom said she didn't know if she wanted to go so i said that i will have to take Tracy with me. I think Tracy will talk her in to going with me. Tracy doesn't like shopping and he especially doesn't like shopping when there is 100,000 people in the mall that's 100 degrees. Oh course i would rather go shopping when there isn't as many people but it's Black Friday! Well i should get my butt in the shower. After giving Tracy a lecture about getting home at exactly 9:45 so we can get to my parents house around 12 so i have time to make my pies so i dont have to stay up to midnight doing it i probably should be ready when he gets here! Where is he you might ask? He has the unfortunate task of evicting someone out of their apartment. Before you go thinking we are horrible people for evicting someone the day before Thanksgiving it's not me that is evicting them. The property was foreclosed on and the bank that now owns the property is evicting all the tenants. We offered this guy cash for keys (cash for moving out by a certain time) but he blew us off and never showed up at the eviction hearings. I feel sorry for him but we did everything to help this guy. Sometimes they think they really wont get evicted.
Anyway it's almost Thanksgiving so

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!

Yesterday we had our last visit (well last visit until we have to do our post-placement visits) with our social worker (L). L came out to our house so we could fill out a "home safety form" for our agency. I thought a home safety form would have actual safety questions on it. I though we were going to be making sure all our smoke detectors worked and all our windows had some sort of child safety feature on them. I thought we would be going thru our house talking about where we need to do a little child proofing and what our plan is to child proof our house. It was nothing like that. We sat at the dining room table eating cookies, drinking coffee and making fun of the questions on the home safety form. One of the questions was "Do all of the bathrooms have enough toilet paper and soap". HA. There were a few other questions that were pretty funny, like is there food stored in our refrigerator, but that one takes the cake.
Hopefully our home study will be written this week and we will be able to submit it to our agency for final approval. Once we have final approval we can send our home study in for USCIS approval...again. While we are waiting for CIS approval i have to get a few more documents together for our dossier. Once we have all those together they will be notarized, state certified and then off to the China consulate to be certified and then translated and then off to China! My goal is to have our dossier logged in China by February 1st.

List

It's official!! We are on the list! Last week I sent in our signed agency contract. On Tuesday i spoke with our dossier consultant and then to the waiting child coordinator who officially put us on the waiting child list! So we are officially "waiting" again. What this means for us is once a child comes up on the waiting child list that matches our profile we will get to look over her profile and decide if we want to accept that referral. The waiting child program is a little different then the non-waiting child program in that there really isn't a "line" we are in. There is also no clear wait time. We could receive a referral at any time. The longest wait we were told is about 12-14 months for referral but most people receive their referral much sooner then that. I am really hoping we get a referral by Christmas but i know that it might not happen by then.

So now i have to get our dossier ready again. Our dossier will consist of our USCIS approval, birth certificates, marriage license, copies of our passport, a financial statement, employment records, medical forms, local police clearance, family photo's and our home study. Oh and did i mention we need 3 copies of each. All these will need to be notarized, state certified, then sent to the China consulate to be authenticated, then translated. Once all that is done our dossier can be sent to China to be logged in.
It may sound like a lot but i hope to have our dossier logged in by the end of the year. That is my goal. The only thing that might hold it up is our CIS approval. Well maybe not. We don't have to get re-approved, it's just a country change so hopefully it will only take a week or 2. OK maybe that's wishful thinking on my part.

I DID IT!!!

There are 3 things that should make you very proud of me.
#1 I VOTED!!
#2 AND I GOT TRACY TO VOTE TOO!! It was the first election he ever voted in.
#3 I got the first of my Hep. b series vaccines. and lived to tell about it. It was touch and go for a little while but i pulled thru, had a little juice, lied down while Tracy was getting his shots and now that it is over i am feeling a lot better. My arm is a little sore. Hopefully it wont get much worse. We also had to get a TB test but it was nothing. I didn't even feel it. Now lets see if i can make it thru the other 2 Hep B shots and the tetanus booster i need.

Ohhh the things we do for love.