Wow! It has been a while since I have written. The waiting is so hard sometimes that I have to put reminders of how long we have to go out of my mind. We definitely made some huge strides this week! On May 31st we did our biometric fingerprinting for USCIS. Then waited until Monday June 27th. We got our approval letter in the mail. MTM and I tried to figure out how we would accomplish our next step. We needed to get a stamp of approval from each notary's county court house. Little did we know, we had to go to 5 different county court houses yesterday (Hamilton, Clermont, Butler, Warren, and Madison). We ended our day by taking all of those approvals to Columbus, the Secretary of State of Ohio's office, to get the final seals of approval. I had six maps with directions, stacks of papers telling me what papers needed to get approved at each court house and a very calm and eager husband to get me through the day. I can't imagine if I had tried to go it alone. We started out the day at 9:30 am with just the two of us. We went to the first 2 court houses and then went home to get our 2 youngest. They had to endure the rest of the journey with us which included a high stress mom and lots of speeding down the highway. Our challenge was to get all of this done in one day so that we could get all of our paperwork to our agency before the holiday. The Ethiopian Courts close from the beginning of August to October, so nothing official can happen during that time. We are trying to race against that clock. We made it to Columbus by 4:25 and the office closes at 5pm. They graciously began collecting all of our papers and checked and stamped them all with no complaints. We left the building at 5:07 pm. Whooh! I reflected on the drive home about all of the nice people we encountered throughout our day and knew that we must have had a guiding hand to make it through all of those hoops!
Today I will make a copy of our Dossier (official name of the stack of official papers) and overnight it to Children's Hope International. We will be notified in the next few weeks when we are officially on the waiting list for our 3-4 year old girl. The next phase of waiting begins! If this process isn't a test of a person's patience, I don't know what is!
Until next time,
DMM
Today I will make a copy of our Dossier (official name of the stack of official papers) and overnight it to Children's Hope International. We will be notified in the next few weeks when we are officially on the waiting list for our 3-4 year old girl. The next phase of waiting begins! If this process isn't a test of a person's patience, I don't know what is!
Until next time,
DMM
