Excerpts from our last month....
A walk to the bank across the Cub parking lot with our doctor to have her sign our physical reports in front of a notary. A trip to the city of Roseville's office to pick up notarized statements that Kevin and I have no police records in Roseville. A trip back a few days later when I realize the notary forgot to add her stamp. Getting 12 pictures of our family printed at Target to send to China (per their request), and realizing that because of the angle, one of my children looks like they are not wearing any clothes. Choosing another picture and getting it reprinted. An early morning trip to the Secretary of State's office in St. Paul with 4 children to get our 12 notarized documents 'certified'. Oh, but my birth certificate is from Wisconsin, so they can't certify it. They direct me to go to the bank down the street, have them make a copy and notarize that I showed them my original. Do that, then take that back to the Secretary of State's office for certification. Go home and get ready to send to the courier who will have all these certified documents authenticated in Washington D.C. She needs copies of everything we send, so Kevin lovingly makes beautiful color copies, but then I realize they are not allowed to be color copies, they must be black and white and you cannot un-staple any of the pages, you must copy them being folded over, even if that means some of the information cannot be seen on the copies. Fix the copies. Take the copies and certified documents to Fed Ex to send to the courier. I need a pre-paid shipping label for our courier to send us back the documents once they are authenticated, but I forgot my account number for Fed Ex at home, and they can't look it up. I go back that evening and they have a wrong number on our account that can't be fixed until the morning when the business office opens. We go back the next morning and finally got it sent out to the courier in Chicago. Courier calls after receiving the documents and says actually my birth certificate needs to be sent to Wisconsin for certification, not Minnesota. I send it to Wisconsin and the courier will be holding our paperwork. All of this is going on while we got fingerprinted in St. Paul a few weeks ago and submitted our application with USCIS requesting that we be allowed to adopt a foreign child who will then become an American citizen. We're waiting for that approval. We found a 'rush' service that can certify and authenticate that approval, when we get it and get it to our agency within a week. Once all these documents I've been talking about have gotten all the seals they need, they'll go to our agency in California and be mailed out across the Pacific Ocean. This is a great day and in the China adoption community, affectionately referred to as DTC. Dossier to China. Definitely a marker. And time to take a deep breath.
On a serendipitous note, our agency said we can ask for an update anytime and so we did! We asked a few questions of the caretakers who have our soon-to-be daughter and for an updated picture and video. Within a few days the orphanage responded! We saw two more videos and heard a little bit more about her life thus far. We are counseled not to share pictures or videos on the internet until she is officially ours, so we'll follow that counsel. But I'll share that in the first picture we saw of her she looked pretty melancholy, with her head resting on her hands.No appearance of joy. In the new picture we got, she is beaming and I smile every time I look at it.
So, 'How are things going with the adoption?" The real life version is what is listed above. The answer you'll probably get if you ask me in person is "Good, just doing some paperwork."
And even with this mini excerpt of the rigamaroll that is adoption...she's worth every signature, staple, car trip, copy, re-copy and hoop we're jumping through.
Thanks for caring about our family and our journey. Pray for our family to continue to prepare well - physically and emotionally for the big change. Pray for our little Jia Yun. That she will not grow up too much without us. And please pray for the little ones all over this globe who do not have a family to feel secure in tonight. Pray that a family begins to pursue them soon, or that the Lord meets the unmet needs of their hearts in supernatural ways that only He can.
And Happy Belated Easter from the Hubers clan.
