I just got off the phone with the Secretary of State's office, and she said that if we hand deliver our dossier, then they can apostille it within a few minutes' time!!!!!!! Having said that, we are waiting for 2 last documents from Amy and then we'll be taking our dossier to Montgomery! Hooray! Of course, we still do not have our 171-H from the CIS...but when I talked to her this morning, Amy said that it appears that the Atlanta CIS office is now reviewing/sending 171's for homestudies received the first week in July. Ours was sent in on July 25th. Now, before anyone gets too excited (including myself!), it can take a couple days or over a month to get through a week's worth of homestudies at the CIS. So we can't be sure when they'll get to ours...but we can pray that they go quickly!! :)

Also, I am beginning to require myself to think about life after the baby gets here. Like I said in my last post, it's just so surreal that I can't even think about it...but I finally have started to make myself think more about it. I've purchased little things here & there, have started looking at furniture...and have started a Target registry! Now, mind you, I only have TWO things on the registry, but it will help me keep up with things that people have said they couldn't have lived without. These things have helped me to realize that things are going to be okay and to acknowledge that we have a baby on the way...whenever it may be!

In closing, I'm going to post a couple pictures of our dossier -- sans the 2 docs that Amy is sending us, and the 171-H. Other than those, we are ready to go! Hopefully we'll be making a trip to Montgomery sometime next week!!! Yippee!

And here's a picture of our almost-complete dossier, along with the pictures we have to send. One more note about our dossier: this is not the whole thing. Once CHI receives it, they will add other documents that are needed...and I've heard that it's not uncommon for dossiers to be an entire ream of paper, if not more!!