One Year Ago Today

One year ago we sent in our dossier for our third adoption. One year ago we sat back and started dreaming of the little girl across the world who would become our daughter. One year ago we talked about how it would be our last Thanksgiving and Christmas as a family of four. One year ago we anxiously began to wait for the call.
Now, one year later, I really don't feel like we've made any progress at all. We are still dreaming of a little girl across the world, still anxiously waiting for the call, and still talking about how this will be our last Thanksgiving and Christmas as a family of four.
The past year has brought us so much joy too; I'm just feeling a little melancholy today as we hit the one-year mark.
I'm praying that one year from today we'll be holding our sweet little girl in our arms and reminiscing about how quickly the year has gone.

One Step Forward, One Step Back

Wouldn't you think that doing a dossier for the fourth time would be a piece of cake? I really didn't think it would take any time to update all of our documents, considering most of them were already on our computer. And after a little nagging at Stu to get our financial documents together, we had our part finished pretty quickly. What I didn't count on was our homestudy agency's (different agency than our placing agency) ability to screw up anything that I ask them to do. I'm not sure why their continual incompetence continues to surprise me, but it does. Our social worker (whom I love!) came to our house to do the homestudy update. After that, I contacted the agency and told them the list of documents I needed and how many copies of each I needed. Easy enough, right?!? Well, they couldn't find our old documents (probably in one of our closed files from the boys' adoptions which they continue to lose our new documents in) so I offered to send them templates of the documents. All they would have to do is fill in their information. A week later we received an email asking if we needed them to do those documents. Um, yeah. That's why I sent you the template. So another week later I received the documents in the mail. Unfortunately, they only sent one copy of each when I asked for, and needed, two of each. So another week later and they send the extra copies. Later that night, as I was gathering all of our documents to get certified and apostilled I noticed that on EVERY SINGLE ONE of the documents from our homestudy agency, they had used the wrong passport number for Stu!! Arrghh!!! Even more frustrating is that we paid them to do an addendum to our homestudy this summer because Stu's passport expired and he had been issued a new number. SOmehow this new number never made it into their system. I am still, impatiently, waiting on these updated documents. This level of incompetency just infuriates me. They are a large agency and it's hard for me to believe that this type of paperwork should be anything other than routine for them. We've been having these type of problems with them since beginning the Chipmunk's adoption over 4 years ago! We've stayed with them because they do our post-placement reports and we really do like our social worker. But as soon as this adoption is finished, we're changing.
Once we get these new documents in, along with our new state background checks (which listed a wrong birthday for Stu), our new dossier will be finished. Yeah! I'm also very excited about the rumors I'm hearing regarding reaccreditation happening very soon! Should make for a very happy holiday season for many families (including ours, hopefully).
Other than that, not much happening here. We've been the house of sickness recently. Poor Chipmunk ended up having a virus by the end of Halloween night and was so sick for a few days. He thinks his belly hurt because of all of the candy he ate and refuses to touch another piece of candy. Of course, I'm not going to try to change his mind on that! And then a few days later, the Monkey ended up with this stomach virus. And the Monkey is very much like me in that when he gets sick, he gets very sick for a long time. After a week of high fevers and hundreds of trips to the bathroom each day, I think he is finally on the mend.
Looks like things are looking up around our household.
Now we can look forward to celebrating the Chipmunk's 5th birthday on Sunday!