Dossier!

Yes, I know it's been over a month since either one of us has written anything, so here's a little update.

Our I-171H arrived late last month, and we were on a whirlwind trip to see Mr. Bradford and have some more things notarized. After an evening with him, and a couple of hours making sure everything was "just so" with our paperwork, we sent our dossier's off to the Secretary of State to get certified. We anticiatped them being in Tallahassee for 5 business days. We sent the documents on a Monday afternoon, and counted the travel days, business days, and weekend days and figured we wouldn't receive it from the SoS until the following Wednesday. Boy, were we wrong! Our dossier's arrived on Thursday...just three days after we submitted it!!! In fact, Dan and I were both out of town the day it arrived. Thankfully, Tyger was coming over to spend the night with Jack, or our entire lives would have been sitting on our doorstep for over 24 hours.

The Monday after our dossier's arrived from the SoS, they were off again, this time traveling to the Vietnam Embassy in Washington, DC. I sent them on 3/12, and have been obsessively checking fedex.com 20+ times a day. But I am SO excited to report that our dossier's are on their way back to us! They left DC this afternoon, and should arrive at our house no later than 3:00pm tomorrow. We were anticipating their arrival for Monday afternoon, just based on the timelines of other adoptive parents we have been in contact with. It's just so exciting to know that it will be here tomorrow!

Now, in case you didn't know...we are currently remodeling the kitchen/dining room! Right now there is nothing in the dining room, including carpet and light fixtures. The floor is bare, and the ceiling has no popcorn! Our loft is filled with dining room furniture, as is our living room. Just tonight Dan has been working on scraping the popcorn off the ceiling in the kitchen. This comes after a two week endeavor that Pop and I had in the kitchen scraping wallpaper and texture off every inch of the kitchen. Once the popcorn is off, Dan will re-texture the walls, and will put knockdown on the ceiling. Then the dining room and kitchen will be primed and painted. Next will be refinishing the cabinets and replacing fixtures. And finally...NEW FLOORS! We're also looking at some tile to do backspashes along the walls, but we haven't purchased any tile yet. The final touches to the rooms will be new light fixtures, and the pocket door that Dan is putting in.

All of that is to say...we are going a little crazy around here. This weekend Dan and I will be frantically doing "family activites" together and snapping photographs, and we are searching through anyone we know with photos of our house to find an indoor photograph of our house that we can attach with our dossier. So, if you were ever looking for a way to help us out with our adoption, you can do so by submitting any pictures to me that you might have of the inside of our house, or of the two of us doing some type of "family activity". :-) Just send them on!

In all seriousness, we have one final step before we are "Dossier to Vietnam" or DTV. We need to create a two page scrapbook of us. It will include 6 pictures with simple captions. One photo of the inside of our house, one of the outside, and 4 of the two of us. We are contemplating taking four different outfits out and doing various activites and then changing clothes so they don't look like they were all taken the same day. :-)

We are waiting for updated copies of our homestudy to arrive (hopefully Monday), and once we have those in our hands and the scrapbook, we will submit them to our agency. We could be DTV by next week, if things continue to run smoothly. Once we are DTV, thats when the real wait begins. We've been told that once we are DTV we're looking at a 3-4 month wait for referrals, and a 2-3 month wait for travel. What a wonderful wedding anniversary it would be to be in Vietnam, and with children!! The time frame is what we would be looking at if we were adopting only one child. We have been warned that with adopting two, we might wait a little bit longer than normal. So, cross your fingers and say a prayer. We'd love to be back in the states with our little ones by the holidays.