Blurry Blessings

Update: We have officially sent all of our dossier documents and pictures off to either our agency or DC for national authentication!! We are one step closer to having everything sent off to China, which will hopefully happen within the next couple weeks!!

        Warning Long Post About A Mom On A Mission!!!

I've titled this post Blurry Blessings because the last two weeks have been a blur, full of Court Houses, the State Secretary's Office and FedEx, but at the same time its a blessing to be able to do all these things, because we are getting one step closer to our son!! Two weeks ago we got our official I-800a approval from the US to adopt a child internationally. Woohoo!! So after this approval I thought I had everything ready to go get authenticated, I was wrong.

I hope I don't confuse anyone but if I do let me know and I'll try to make it less confusing!

 All of our documents that were notarized, for our dossier, needed to be county authenticated and then state authenticated before we could ship them out to DC for national authentication.  Confused Yet? Well I had everything county authenticated and decided to drive them over to Columbus myself for state authentication. I go into their very official building and get past the very intimidating security officer and talk to the person at the desk, he then takes all my documents back to be authenticated. I was so excited and nervous at the same time while I waited! Then he comes back and tells me everything was state authenticated, except for our homestudy!! At this point I'm fighting back tears, I was expecting to then go to FedEx and ship everything out to DC, but I couldn't. What in the world, this man was standing between me and my little boy and I was ready cry, that was the only thing I could think to do that wouldn't ruin my chances of getting the rest of my documents authenticated!!!

I found out that our homestudy agency didn't use the correct notary for our homestudy. It was notarized by their attorneys assistant, instead of the actual attorney (who doesn't have to have a county authentication and can go right to state).

So after many phone calls to the county that the homestudy was notarized in, and being transferred 7 different times, to 7 different people who didn't have a clue what I needed. I decided that instead to sending my last copy of my homestudy out to people who didn't know what I needed in the first place, that I would drive it up there myself and get the correct county documents!! So that's just what I did, I drove 6 hours round trip to get my one document county certified! Thank God it was a beautiful day and I had a safe drive!

I had a lot of time to myself during this drive and I thought that doing this might seem a little crazy, but to a mom who only has these precious documents linking her to her son thousands of miles away from her, this wasn't all that crazy after all. Because as moms we will all do anything we can for our children! I was a mom on a mission that day and no one was going to stand in my way!

I made it safely to Cleveland! And once I was in their courthouse I realized why I was transferred 7 times the day before. This place was huge! I was in 4 different rooms before I was directed to the correct place, which happened to be in the basement! But after being in there for a total of 30 minutes, I got my county certification. I then drove down to Columbus and got my last state authentication!!!!!

Finally we were able to ship everything out to DC!! And that's where we are now, waiting for things to be authenticated at the national level. Once that's finished everything will go to our agency to be translated and sent out to China.

I am so excited to get things sent out and on their way over to China, I can hardly stand it!!

Please be praying for us! Once China gets our dossier, we can finally request an update about our little guy!! Its been a long 7 months with no new pictures, videos, or updates about him. But through this time my faith has been made stronger each day, in our God who is making all of this even possible, and for that I am thankful!!

Also if anyone is interested, we have designed our own TShirt for our little man. Here it is:

Inside China are the Chinese Symbols for FAMILY and LOVE. If you would like to support us by purchasing one they are $20 and right now we are taking orders for them!! So just let me know if you would like 1 or 2 or 3!!