A lot to fill you in on...

I have been gone for over a month. Wow, time flies...

Anyway, we have been going pretty much none stop since my last post. Jacob is playing baseball and running track, Nathan is running track, and Kylie, John and Kaycee have been sick off and on.

Leonard and I went to Las Vegas for a couple of days - really it was because he had convention for work, I just hung out by the pool and relaxed. It was really nice to get to be just the two of us. We have gone on many vacations, but there is always someone's child around. (For example, we have gone to Florida and California without our children, however, we had about 10 other kids with us for their senior trip.)

Anyway, it was nice, but Las Vegas is really not for me. I spent $6.00 and Leonard spent $1.00 in the nickel slots. Last of the big spenders, aren't we? But when you are trying to come up with about $16,000 in the next 10 months for an adoption, it is hard to spend money on something that doesn't usually give anything back.

Speaking of adoption: We wrote out our Letter of Intent (LOI) and have sent it to the agency. The letter states we understand that Noah has a special need, that he is not a "healthy" child, and that we still want to adopt him anyway. But the bad news is...China has recently changed their rules regarding adoptions - of which, none of them have affected us...except that we cannot send in our LOI yet as we are not close enough to being done with our dossier or our homestudy. Apparently, there is now a three month window in which the paperwork needs to be done in...just found that out today. YIKES! Three months...This really is impossible, as the homestudy needs to be completed in order for us to get our immigration paperwork completed. We have to apply for a time to get fingerprinted, first, but have to have the homestudy done - first. The homestudy will usually take about 3 months to be completed. Confused? It seems that if you are not familiar with international adoptions, it does get very complicated and crazy.

Here is a breakdown: (not mine...yet)

1. Our LOI is completed and in the hands of the agency.
2. The agency is going to hold the LOI to "buy us some time"
3. We are waiting to be matched with a social worker to do our homestudy.
4. The homestudy needs to be completed (three visits with the social worker)
5. The homestudy needs to be completed before we can apply for our I800a, immigration ok to be fingerprinted.
6. We then need to get fingerprinted and then wait to get those back.
7. In the meantime, we are gathering birth certificates, marriage certificates, doctor's notes, letters of employment, etc etc etc...Geesh, we just adopted less than a year ago, can't they just use some of that? Just kidding...
8. At which time, all of this paperwork needs to be notarized, certified and then authenticated, then it can all be translated and then sent to China. I will explain all of this in another post. I am a little tired right now...