Moving along, like a turtle. And other random thoughts...

I had every intention of being a great blogger - one of those awesome webpages that is graphically appealing and is updated every evening with beautiful photos and words depicting a wonderful life.  

In truth, our life is wonderful - for the most part.  I mean nobody has a perfect day every day.

But I want to formally offer my apologies for any broad claims I've made about "keeping my blog updated" or "posting often".  

It's just not gonna happen.

Also, my blog isn't going to look cool.  I'm not a photographer, and I spend more time cleaning up the mess of the moment and worrying about how my messy fingers, or someone else's, might ruin the camera.  I tried today, though.  We made moonsand together - me and the girls.  And I took a couple pictures of it too!  I even wanted to upload them, but our computer is running really slow tonight (which means I’m actually uploading this post 3 days after writing it).  So, it's going to be a boring picture-less blog.  And I got moonsand on the camera.  And the driveway has a lot on it too.

A lot of people have been asking how our adoption is coming along and get really excited when I say "It's coming along!"  or "We're in process!" or "We're waiting on our USCIS paperwork right now!"  They follow this up with "Does that mean you get to bring your little boy home soon?!"  or "So where is your son right now?"

I think I disappoint them a little with my answer.  So, for clarification -   

This isn't a speedy process.  

However, we are moving along and that is VERY exciting news for us!  One thing we have learned and are continuing to learn, and will continue to learn even more - is patience.  This is a waiting game.  

We completed our home study at the beginning of August (YAY!!!) and then mailed our I800-A to the USCIS a little over a week ago and today I received confirmation that they received it.  Lead times here can be up to 12 weeks.  The I800-A is the governments pre-approval for us to travel overseas to adopt a child.  Getting this pre-approval (the 797) will get us much closer to submitting our dossier (paperwork) to the Chinese Consulate in the U.S. and then it will go to China.  At any point we could be assigned our child, but this isn't likely to happen before our dossier is submitted to China.  There are a lot more documents to be filed and wait for before we get to travel and bring home our son.  But at this point each small step is a step in the right direction.  

Thank you for praying for us and with us!  Thank you for being excited with us!  

We are still selling raffle tickets for our fundraiser until September 25!  So if you'd like to purchase raffle tickets for our freezer full adoption fundraiser let me know!!  Tickets are $5/1 or $20/5   and if you'd like to help by selling raffle tickets to your friends/neighbors/coworkers let me know and I will mail you several!  I just need all money and tickets returned to me by September 25.  Again, this is limited to the QCA area.