Submitted dossier!

We continue to make great adoption strides! We submitted our entire dossier to our adoption agency this afternoon. It feels sooo good to get our dossier off our hands. Hopefully, (fingers crossed), we don't have to re-do any of the documents! Our dossier is being sent to the New York consulate early next week to be translated into Russian, considering all of the documents are accepted by Tree of Life :) So very exciting.

Immigration Approval has arrived!

We got our immigration approval!!!!! It was Gabriel's Birthday present, being that it was approved on the 27th. Best Birthday gift ever! Actually getting our child would be the BEST gift ever, but the immigration approval is one step closer. Thank you for everyone's prayers!....Before I sign off, I have a sad but now funny story for you all. Early last week (before we received our approval) Gabe got a call from UPS that we would be receiving a package that day and someone would need to be home to sign for it, he was certain it was going to be our long awaited immigration approval. Gabe was floored! Being that the call was at 6:45am he fell back asleep and then was awaken by the doorbell. He scurried out to chase the UPS truck in the snow, with no shoes or shirt. He ripped the envelope open, to find our second set of birth certificates. He walked back to the house with his head hung low....It's funny because we thought with the arrival of our immigration we would be so relieved. Don't get me wrong we are extremely happy to have the waiting for this one document behind us, but we aren't done yet. Tomorrow Gabe is going to drive an hour to our adoption agency to bring a few documents that we had to get re-notarized. We don't our baby waiting one more day then she needs to!

Adopt-A-Monkey

We are selling these adorable sock monkeys, constructed by Gabe and our mothers, to help us pay for the remaining costs of our international adoption. Click on the picture to the right and it'll take you to etsy.com where you can adopt our monkeys.

Adoption Update

We emailed the Utah government office to see where the heck our USCIS paperwork is. Their reply was quick, our paperwork is pending and they said it will "hopefully" get to us within 4 weeks. I suppose it's comforting to know that our paperwork is pending rather than lost. Still 4 weeks means we have to get half of our dossier redone. At least we know what we're doing this time around. For those families that our searching our blog from Kaz Blogs, just know that USCIS is taking appoximately 4 months to process at this time:(

2 rooms down, 6 to go

These are the only two rooms worth posting at this point. The end product was worth the work, even the removal of the devil wallpaper. All worth it!

Waiting, waiting, waiting, and then waiting some more.

We feel like our life is on hold because our adoption process is all held up due to one document, the evil I-171. We've been waiting on this for over 2 months. We can't submit our dossier until we receive it. We can't move anywhere until we receive this blasted document. The I-171 for those of you who are less adoption savvy is the Petition to adopt an orphan. The government gives themselves a 3 month window to get us the document or more I suppose if they feel like it. Ridiculous. Supposedly there have been some internal changes and thus we suffer. We are getting close to the point of where we have to get some of our documents redone because it has been more then 3 months since we started our dossier. It's difficult not to feel powerless to everything right now. Please, everyone pray for us that we'll get this approval soon!

Christmas 2009

I finally got around to blogging. Better late then never, right? So, this year was kind of rough because we went from having 2 weeks off from work to 2 days. At least it only takes 2 hours to see our family. We are loving being able to see them so easily! This Christmas Eve we spent with the O'Neil family and Christmas day was spent with the Madsen's. It was so great to spend some time with the family, just wish we had more of it!