Mailbox Stalking Paid Off

Yesterday, Josh called me at work to give me the normal update on the content status of the daily mail, the same thing he and my Mom have been taking turns doing on their appointed day for the last 12 days or so as we stalked the mail for the final piece of paperwork to arrive so we could complete our dossier.  He started the conversation out, “So, how is your day going?”  My heart nearly skipped a beat as they have both been instruction to respond to my hello with a “Yes” or a “No” as they know why they are calling and what I am expecting (i.e. needing) to hear.  Finally, he told me, YES, it came.  The USCIS approval form came in the mail!!!!  (For those other parents in process out there who had to send paperwork back to USCIS for an update, it took 17 days including 3 weekends as it arrived there on a Friday morning and back home on a Monday afternoon.)  This final piece of paper is our approval visa to adopt our son from Ethiopia and we needed this as a part of our dossier.  Yeah!!

So then, Josh came to work to have my co-worker notarize two final documents.  Then I made final copies of the whole dossier of 24 notarized documents.  This morning, Josh and I found our way to the Office of the Great Seal in Grand Rapids, located in a mall of all places, to have the first two documents “sealed”.  And then this afternoon, I prepared the packet to be mailed to a courier service to have them walk our dossier through the US Department of State in D.C. as well as the Ethiopian Embassy in D.C. Here is a picture of our packet before I sent it.  This is the last time we will see our documents. 

 

After this is done, the courier service will mail the dossier back to Adoption Associates in Jenison and they will mail our dossier to Ethiopia and then….. we will be on the WAIT LIST TO RECEIVE A REFERRAL!!

Now I know it sounds like a whole lot of excitement to just start waiting again, but we have been jumping through a lot of hoops that last 3 months in order to adopt from Ethiopia as opposed to Lesotho and we are finally really close to having the major portion of the paperwork complete.  Praise God!!