The Road to Ren

Where to start, where to start...

It's been exactly three weeks since my last substantial blog post, and so much has happened since then, so please let me back track a bit and bring you up to speed on what's been happening! This back tracking will need to happen in a series of posts, but let me start with an update on the adoption front.  

The last time I wrote, I filled you in on the drama with USCIS and how disheartened we were with bureaucracy and indefinite wait times. Well, just one week after I mailed out our revised home study to CIS, we got our approval letter!  

It came rather unexpectedly, three Saturdays ago. I was having my Red Tent girls over for dinner (another post on that later), and Chris brought the mail in just after we'd finished eating. I was clearing dishes from the table and Chris nudged me and pointed to an opened envelope on the kitchen counter. I looked down and saw the words "Department of Homeland Security." I looked up, my eyes wide, my jaw hanging down, searching Chris's face for some sort of clue--Is this it?  Is it already here!?!  He smiled and nodded and I grabbed the letter and scanned it for the only word I needed to see: APPROVAL. And there it was, in black and white, and I started laughing and crying all at once.  

My dear friend Carly, who has a gift with the camera, was in our kitchen when this was all going down, and she started shooting away.  My joy, my relief, my uncontainable emotions, captured candid on film, thanks Car!

It was so much fun to have my girl friends here to join in this celebration with me. They have listened as I've shared my deep fears and joys at the dinner table, and it was special that I could share this milestone with them.

After the ladies headed home, Chris and I popped open a bottle of Prosecco and clinked our glasses together, grateful to be one step closer to our son.

Frizzante!

Toast to Ren!

The following week proved to be a bit insane. I got our approval letter notarized that Monday, and then, of course, we found one other glitch on a financial form that required a notary to witness Chris's boss's signature. After pulling a few strings, we got that worked out, and finally, on Thursday I was bound for Sacramento,

to the notary department at the Secretary of State's office, where our entire dossier was to be state certified.

It took me longer to find a parking place than it did to get our paperwork certified. Thirty minutes and two hundred and seventy dollars later, I was walking out of there, our dossier finally complete!

It was a beautiful day, and I even got to see the pristine monument of bankrupt California!

That evening, Chris stayed home with the girls so I could take over the copy machine at Kinko's. Before I left the house, Chris took a picture of me and my pregnant paper belly.

I was specifically instructed NOT to take any staples out of the original documents, so I got to fold each individual document back to photocopy one at a time, careful not to obscure the state-certification seals I had just paid big bucks for. Two hours and several trees later, this fat stack lay before me...

I nearly had a panic attack as the Fed-Ex clerk pried seven months of paper gestation out of my hands to put in an envelope. Tiffany, our China case manager, said that never in her six years at AGCI has she seen a dossier get lost in the mail, and I prayed to God that ours wouldn't be the first.

Still, despite my angst, I felt a massive sense of release as I walked out of Kinko's that night. Mailing off our dossier marked the end of a significant portion of this journey, and the beginning of yet another stretch of road ahead. It also freed up a substantial chunk of space on my desk!

I got a call from Tiffany early the following week. She sounded excited and perky--far more enthusiastic than I was used to. She said our dossier looked perfect and she was stoked because usually she finds a few glitches. She also said it was already on its way to the Chinese Consulate in Washington DC, where it will be authenticated. This process usually takes 2-3 weeks. After that, it will cross the big blue Pacific en route to China, where it will be translated and then hopefully accepted, after which we will receive our monumental "log in date," which gives Tiffany access to view all the children in the databank of waiting orphans on our behalf. She expects our referral to come at some point this autumn.  

Just before we hung up the phone, she said, "Well, your wait has officially started!"  Huh? Just now? I thought. What about the past seven months...doesn't that count too? 

But then it struck me that we had suddenly been filed into a new category...a category where we are taken far more seriously...as if the seven months of paperwork was some sort of testing ground to see how committed we really were to this adoption. I suppose they have a lot of drop outs during the paperwork phase. We were in JV, but we've just moved up to Varsity, baby!

So here's to the next leg of this long road to precious Ren!

Thanks for being a part of the ride with us, for your prayers that sustain us and your encouragement that refreshes us!