Dossier complete and off to Oregon, Chicago and China!

Well, things didn't turn out exactly how we expected this week. But it all ended up fine. The end of the story is that we overnighted our COMPLETED dossier to our adoption agency (in Oregon)yesterday and they got it today!

The abbreviated version of our week is that the CIS lady thought I had set up a UPS account and not a FedEx account (as I had told her), so our approval didn't get to us until Wednesday. That is a story in itself. I specifically asked for the document to be sent with no signature required b/c I knew that it wasn't likely that we would be home on Saturday (which is when it was supposed to arrive). Well, go figure, the CIS lady got that info wrong too and marked "signature required" on the delivery. And, of course, to add to the saga of the CIS paperwork, the FedEx man arrived just as I was getting out of the shower Wednesday morning. The kids were rushing upstairs, "Mommy, mommy, the delivery man is here! He needs you. He keeps knocking and isn't leaving." I tell them (as I stand at the top of the stairs wrapped in a towel) to open the door and get the package. They open the door, but he needs a signature...and apparently a 10 year old's signature doesn't count. Of course. So, I rush around and throw on clothes and ended up with a really bad hair day (b/c if I miss my window of drying my hair, it gets all frizzy and, well, really bad).

Back to the rest of the week...I ended up going downtonw to get all of the papers state certified on Tuesday morning. We were set to send all of our paperwork to our agency on Wednesday, but Andy found one thing missing. He ended up finding the missing document about 11:00pm Wednesday night and then he made a trip downtown Thursday to get it certified. And that was it. More than seven months of paperwork was done. Completely done! I must say, it felt a little strange to send it all away and have no "to do" list hanging over our heads.

Our dossier is on its way to the Chinese Consulate in Chicago today. A copy of it will be in China next week to be translated. Everything should be in China's system in 4-5 weeks. And then we can begin a new waiting period.

Here is Andy holding our completed dossier! (and four copies of the whole thing off to the side).

My thoughts on the whole process: We both felt like you had to be nearly a genius (which neither of us are) to be able to figure out the whole paperwork shuffle, lingo, timeframes and government rules. We are both educated and fairly smart people. And it was not a simple thing to gather what was basically a pile of about 3 dozen papers. As Andy was finalizing all the documents, I couldn't help but think that the stack of papers sure didn't look like something that had taken two grown people seven months to gather. But it did.

And on to Caleb news. I am part of a yahoo group for families that have adopted or are in the process of adopting from the Chengdu orphanage. There is a family that is going to be traveling there in the next few weeks and offered to hand-deliver a gift for anyone that has a child there. So, tomorrow I'm going to commission my mom to make a small pillow with a photo of Andy and me on it. We'll send that to Caleb along with a few other small things. And maybe, just maybe, we'll get more updated photos of him?!

And one more thing. Have you noticed the list of blogs I follow on my sidebar? Well, the Bring the Rain blog lady (Angie) was having a contest to see who had some of the funniest/most emabarrassing kid stories. I sent in a cute story of how Nathan used to think that his name was "Nathan-Andrew-Schmidt-That's-A-No". And I was one of the winners! Yeah! Well, Nathan may have just topped that story with this one today. He was kind of goofily scolding me for something (I don't even know what, dropping a spoon or something?). And he says, "Mommy Kathleen Schmidt!" to me. You know, with the "you're in trouble voice" that moms use. The hilarious thing is that Anna says, "How come he used MY middle name?" Hmm, Anna, maybe b/c I have to stearnly say your "in trouble" name like maybe a million times a day?!! And Nathan didn't even know why he used "Kathleen" as my middle name. He just knows that it's part of the "in trouble" name I yell daily! I think it just sounded "right" to him. julia.