Dossier off to Russia

Our coordinator called and said she received our dossier (whew! now I can stop worrying about where it is, washed up on a beach somewhere...), and that it had to go through a two-step review process. She was concerend about one of the pictures in our photo album (Chris with one of our dogs), and said she worried that Russia would have concerns about an animal that looked like he could pull you apart. I guess he is a pretty big dog, oh well. I substituted a picture of Chris fishing that we had in our den. I had to scan it in then it wouldn't email! I was very stressed that our email wasn't working right, but it finally went after trying for over an hour!
Our coordinator said that our Russian facilitator would be hand-carrying our dossier to Russia tomorrow! Yay! Hope they get reaccreditation done soon, so we can start waiting for our referral.

Dossier on its way!

Well, our dossier should arrive at the agency Monday morning before 10:30am according to the lady at Fed-ex. It was actually hard to put it into that little white, purple and orange box and entrust that the delivery driver would take good enough care of it for my liking. Visions of "Cast Away" kept playing in my mind, and our dossier washing up on the beach! Oh, well, I guess I'm allowed a little obsessing.
Now the wait is on. Waiting for that all important phone call to learn our daughter's name. I'm praying that the time will go by quickly and it won't take the 9-12 months our agency has said it could take. Getting our referral by Christmas would be wonderful, but we'll just have to trust that God's timing is perfect and whenever He gives us our referral that's when we're supposed to go to Russia.

The Fed-Ex Man has Arrived!

Yippee! The Fed-Ex man finally arrived this morning with our apostilled dossier documents! I'm waiting for our adoption coordinator to return our call about some questions I have on how to send all of these papers to her without them getting lost (I would totally freak out if anything happened to them! I'm not even taking them out to make copies today because it's raining. There are 73 pages and I have to make 4 copies of each page!) I'm hoping she'll say we can drop them off Saturday and Chris and I will take a day trip to DC to drop them off. Otherwise, I guess we'll Fed-Ex them and I'll just trust them to take good care of our papers.
Our coordinator reports that reaccreditation is moving along and should be done by early fall, we hope for sooner though.
One more step closer to our baby! I wonder if this is how pregnant women feel when they hear the heartbeat for the first time :0)

Finally home after a long week

It has been a very long week. I left last Sunday for training about 2 and a half hours from home. The training was very good, and it was supposed to last all week. But Chris called Wednesday night with bad news about a family member, so I rushed home and we headed out for a 13 hour drive for a funeral. The funeral was beautiful and I know that she is now pain-free and living with her Savior. We got home last night. It was very good to be home last night, sleeping in our own bed.
I'm working on cleaning up today and getting laundry caught up. Chris dropped off our papers for apostille last week on Wednesday. The lady in the Secretary of State office was surprised to see him. She said they get 20-30 Fed-Ex packages a day, but no one ever comes in. She said we should get them back today or tomorrow, so I am anxiously awaiting the Fed-Ex truck so I can carry the papers to Staple's to copy them for our agency.
I think when we were going through all of those infertility prcedures and we had to wait so many times to see if they worked, God was preparing us for this wait coming up. What is so exciting is that at the end of this wait, there will be a beautiful little girl, not another negative pregnancy test. Praise the Lord!