The waiting has been unbelievably hard. I've pretty much experienced every emotion possible. Excitement. Worry. Fear. Doubt. Joy. Frustration. Happiness. Love. Peace. Anxiety....you name it, I've probably felt it.
At one point we were told the documents were on their way. A month later...no documents. We came to find out it was a mistake and they were never actually sent. The morning I found out that news, I had a good cry.
I can't even begin to tell you the excitement and relief I felt when I saw the FedEx truck drive up..and STOP at my house on Monday, November 2nd. Finally. The documents were here.
I promise Max was super happy too, he just wasn't into taking photos!
My plans were to get everything signed, notarized, apostilled, copied, and mailed back to our agency that same day. Lofty goal? Yes. But I was determined. I wasn't going to let there be ANY delays on our end of the process.
As I started going through the documents, I became both excited and overwhelmed. My thoughts bounced back and forth between, "Wow! I can't believe I actually have original documents that someone from her orphanage really filled out!" and, "Wow! I have SO much to do and the day is already half way over!".
I met Mark and our moms (who dropped everything at the last minute to be witnesses for us) at the bank so we could start getting everything notarized. We were moving along through everything and it was so exciting! Going though her medical and child study reports and having to write "We accept P____ as our daughter." across the bottom of every page was surreal. And then, we hit a little roadblock. Our bank couldn't notarize some of the forms that we needed. The problem with that was that we were hoping to take all our notarized documents to the Secretary of State's office to be apostilled, but we needed them notarized first. So, after a good cry outside the bank (I do that a lot these days...adoption hormones are real people!) we headed to the UPS store to try to get these documents notarized...and had no luck. Seriously. The day that was supposed to be full of joy and excitement, was overshadowed by roadblocks, tears, and a HUGE stress headache.
On Tuesday I must have called every. single. mobile notary in the Phoenix area and got the same answer. "No, those forms cannot be notarized." So, after speaking with our family coordinator, we decided to just send the documents at a later date when we return our court affidavit back to Ind*a. The boys and I made a trip downtown to get the rest of the documents apostilled and as she got started, there were two documents that she wasn't able to issue the apostille. I literally laughed when she told me (better than crying right?!). So, back to the bank we went to get it RE-notarized.
Wednesday, we went back downtown with the papers and were finally able to get what we needed! Praise the Lord!
On Thursday morning, we sat as a family with the documents in our kitchen, all ready to be sent back to our agency and prayed over those precious papers. (You guessed it...I cried. Surprise, surprise!)
Friday, we learned that we needed to update some documents in order for our full dossier to be sent to Ind*a. They were easy updates, but still frustrating. We also found out that we needed to wait to apply for our I-800 until we heard back from our family coordinator who was waiting to hear back from USCIS. Another roadblock. Eventually, we were able to send in our application and everything arrived last week. Hopefully we'll have I-800 approval by early December!
If you're still reading, you're a trooper.I promise to start updating the blog more regularly so I don't pour months worth of events and emotion into one long post!
You would think that I would know this by now, and that I would have this life lesson down perfectly at this point, but I know God is still trying to teach me that I am NOT in control. He is.
You see, we make all these marvelous plans for our day and our for our lives, but in reality, we need to learn to not hold on so tightly to these plans or expectations. We need to realized that God has already written HIS plans for OUR life long before we even thought about those plans. And His plan, is always better. We may not see it on this side of Heaven, but I am confident that one day those "roadblocks" will be revealed to us and we will understand exactly why they needed to happen.
We're fighting for you, Sweet P. You are so loved and we absolutely DO accept you as our precious daughter.
