"An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet regardless of time, place or circumstance.The thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break." -Chinese proverb

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Little bitty pretty one

Today was a very productive day! We received our fingerprint appointment notice from USCIS yesterday.  The appointment was for 11/3 but people often walk in and ask if they can get their appointment early so that's what we did today.  My excuse was that the appointment time was for 8:00 which is too close to when I drop the kids off at school.  My real reason was that I want to get to my baby ASAP!  They allowed it and now we wait for the approval and pray that it comes really quickly.  The other thing that happened is that we received our dossier documents that I sent to Austin to be certified at the Secretary of State, so I did a quick turn around and sent them off to a courier in Houston, who will take them to the Chinese consulate to be authenticated.  I'm a bundle of nervous energy.  I go between being absolutely thrilled that we're nearing the end of working on our dossier and being extremely tense that it is out of my hands. I'm mostly both...super excited and super tense! I'm praying that God will protect every single precious piece of that dossier!  If only Charlotte had any idea how hard we are working to get her home!

Last week, I asked the director of Charlotte's foster home how big she is.  Well, she's not...big, that is. She is teeny tiny!  She is about 28 inches and 18 lbs.  Her big brother, Ethan, is always off the growth charts because he's so big.  Well, Little Miss is off the charts tiny!  She's not even on the charts!  The good news is, she's proportionate and is growing consistently.  She's just a little bitty thing!  Oh my word, all of the clothes I have been buying are way too big!  It's so hard for me to buy smaller sizes than her age!  I can't quite comprehend this.  Ella and Ethan always wore larger sizes than their age...like at age 2, Ella was in a 3 and Ethan was in a 4/5!  Liana has always worn about the right size for her age, maybe a bit smaller.  I'm probably still buying clothes that will be too big but they're smaller now.  Of course when we received the update on her size, we also received some adorable pictures!  So here they are:

Jammies!



Thursday, October 6, 2016

Getting there!

I'm feeling pretty excited today! Since we had to wait so long for our social worker to write up our home study, I started feeling frustrated.  The wait for our adoption agency to approve home studies has been 2-3 weeks lately so I settled in for the wait but 6 days into our wait, BOOM! APPROVED! Thank you, Holt!!!  I think they might have made us a priority because we're under a deadline.  Because we are already matched, we have 6 months from when we submitted our LOI (Letter of Intent) to having our dossier in China and logged in.  It's just a guess but I think they probably prioritize the families who are under this deadline since we have no time to waste. Who knows?! Maybe we just got lucky! So our social service agency had to sign it and notarize it and it got to us today.  As soon as it got here, I packed it up with our I-800A application and some other documents that needed to be included, and a decent sized check, and shipped it off to USCIS.  It will be there tomorrow and then we will wait for fingerprint appointments to come in the mail. 

In the meantime, we are doing really well on our dossier! Today, we ran down to the police department to get clearance letters stating that we have no criminal record. We already had to do an FBI background check and get fingerprinted for our home study.  And then we will be fingerprinted again for our I-800A so we will have had some form of a background check four different times!  Oye!  Good thing we have nothing to hide!  We will hopefully get the rest of the documents for our dossier finished and notarized in the next couple of days so I can send them off to be certified and then off again to be authenticated.  I want to get all of the dossier minus the I-797 (which is actually the approval of the I-800A) completely finished and waiting at Holt so that I can put a rush on the I-797 when it gets here to get it certified, authenticated and together with the rest of our documents at Holt. Can you tell I'm in a rush to get to Charlotte?!

On a cute note, Ella is always finding every chance she can to tell people that she is adopting a little girl from China. :-) She told me that in writing class, they have to write about something that they are looking forward to and she said, "I'm going to write about Charlotte so that my teacher and whole class will know that I'm adopting Charlotte!" Oh my gosh, I love her!

I'm just going to randomly post pictures of Charlotte on here. We have a bunch so instead posting a ton at once, I'll share some in each post to make it more fun. Here is today's dose of cuteness. :-)







And from our video chat