It's been a couple days, hasn't it?? I guess I haven't had that much to report - probably since most offices, etc. are closed over the weekend. So anyway --

Yesterday (Monday), Nathan was off for a State holiday, so I took off, too. Of course, we were planning to do some 'running around' to get passports, etc. taken care of...and yeah, ALL state offices are closed on State holidays. ha ha - guess the joke was on us! ;) Oh well -- so we ended up getting our police reports (hopefully they will be sufficient for our dossier) and our passport pictures. It's funny - when we get our passports, you'll have to ask Nathan to see his... mine is pretty funny, b/c the guy at Kinko's told us not to smile & not to show teeth (don't know why I would show my teeth if I wasn't smiling -- probably would make me look like a rabid bear, don't you think? ha! anyway...) ... I looked really serious -- almost mad...but Nathan had a headache at the time, and in the picture, you can REALLY tell. His eyes are half closed -- he kinda looks drugged, but he wasn't. Anyway, we get a good laugh when we look at those pictures now.

We also went to the bank and talked to a loan officer about consolidating some of our credit, which should help us pay for a few more "upfront" costs. All of the little payments here & there really add up until you really have to have a plan. We know that God will see us through -- but we decided that God also probably wants us to be proactive about our situation. So the visit to the bank yesterday went well...And that seems to be helpful, at least for the next few days! ha ha!

And today... we went to get passports. I had already filled out the paperwork online, and we already had our pictures taken, so that wasn't difficult at all. One thing we must have on ALL of our international adoption paperwork is both of our passport numbers...so we really can't do much else (by way of the great paper chase) till we get our passports....SO, we went the expedited route. Three checks and several hundred dollars later, everything was safely on its way to the National Passport Processing Center...those passports should be to us hopefully in a few days -- they said it could take up to 2 weeks, but we'll cross our fingers & pray that it will be only a matter of a few days!

That's really about it for now... probably the next step is to get the INS paperwork done -- and send that off. Then, hopefully, our child will be approved for his or her visa!! Oh, well, I also have to send our homestudy app off for approval. But I don't anticipate that to be too difficult.

Well - hope you all are having a fantastic week! I will update more as I have the time & updates!

Until then...take care!
Love,
Melissa :)

Labels: International Adoption, Paperwork