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