so very close to being approved!

Last week was a whirlwind of phone calls to and from the nice CIS lady. She reviewed our homestudy Monday afternoon and tried to call us Tuesday. I finally spoke to her on Wednesday and found out there were a few minor details missing in the homestudy. I spent Wednesday afternoon emailing our adoption agency and social worker about the changes that needed to be made to our homestudy. They both acted super fast and had the needed documents in the mail as of Friday afternoon. We are expecting to have an approval issued on Monday or Tuesday this week. And in between the whole CIS/adoption agency/social worker communication stuff going on, I made four trips to our family doctor to get medical paperwork updated (since we are way past our expected time frame of getting our documents to China, a lot of our documents are expiring). I made two trips downtown to get our criminal check/fingerprints updated. And Andy had to re-do several other documents that all need to be re-notarized this week as well. All in all, we've both been very busy with paper-shuffling, emails, and phone calls. I tried to get info on the health of Caleb and his orphanage in general, but didn't find anything out. I guess no news is good news at this point.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas and we are finally seeing all kinds of Christmas decorations in the stores now. How does that relate to Caleb and adoption, you may wonder?! Well, at the beginning of this process in March, we estimated that we would likely be in China to get Caleb sometime between December and February. We were, of course, hoping it would be closer to December. So, to make the wait seem a little quicker, I told the kids that the summer would go fast b/c it always does. Then the excitement of back to school stuff would make August and September go by quickly (which it totally has, I might add! And even though our kids don't "go back to school" in the traditional sense, we still get all excited about going to Target and buying all the fun school supplies and having new books to start and new lesson plans to fill in, etc). Then we would finally start to see Christmas things in the store and that would mean we were really close to seeing Caleb. So, although December is still a few months away, it seems right around the corner to us. Or at least that is my way of trying to make this whole waiting process go quicker. Does it sound too far-fetched?!! The hard part will be the wait time after Christmas. I didn't have a plan for making that wait seem quick, b/c I was really thinking we would have had our documents in China by now. Nothing in Indiana is fast in January or February. That time of the year always seem to drag on and feel dreary and l-o-n-g even when you aren't waiting for something big like a letter from China! So, if you have any ideas for making January and February seem like they are "just around the corner", let me know!!

And since I have no new photos of Caleb to post, here is a picture of all of us in Colorado last month. We were there for Andy's brother's wedding. Isn't it beautiful?