Our week in review:

This has been, perhaps, the craziest week of our lives. My goals this week were to:

Get passport photos taken

Order passports

File our I600A (asks permission from the US government to bring an orphan into the country)

We did all that, but in addition, we:

Did our first homestudy appt, where all of our paperwork was already done, thanks to last weeks trip to Idaho Falls and twenty hours spent in a tiny computer room. :)

Filled out our Power of Attorneys for our facillitators in Eastern Europe

Got those notorized... twice

Picked up the kids medicals

Got their doctor to write a letter of medical expedition to file with his
I600A, asking them to please hurry

Ordered two copies of our marriage license from a very nice lady in Lawton Oklahoma

Ordered our police clearances

Talked Jeremy's doctor into notorizing his license and Jeremy's medical (something he really didn't want to do)

Had Jeremy get a letter of employment notorized... twice

Wasted an hour at Bank of America to learn that they won't notorize my mortgage statement

Wasted another hour on the phone with the County Assessor office to learn that they won't notorize our proof of home ownership

Cried...

Panicked...

Figured out another way to get the information

Called someone on the home mortgage statement

Found someone to do our proof of home ownership

Found someone to notorize both of them at completely inconvenient times

Talked to the world's most awesomest doctor at Shriners hospital

Talked to a lady about cultural connections in the community for children from EE

Found out that I can have someone from his birth country come with me to all his doc appts and assessments to act as a liason and interpreter, to act in his best interest, all for free!!

Discussed assessments with another awesome lady at the school district

And.... kept up with six other kids and a husband, made sure dinner got on the table each night and made sure everyone had clean clothes to wear throughout the week.

Friday, I took the day off and spent it with my neglected sons.

We grabbed happy meals and went to the park for two hours. We came home and Adam and I took naps, then we read books and played in the back yard. Jeremy and I went on a date- out to eat and to Barnes and Noble to pick up a book. Tonight, we will cuddle together and start reading five to eight hours of adoption training materials for our homestudy. Romantic, huh?

Still left... not a whole lot. And that's the good news. Bad news is this is the part that is largely out of our hands. We're waiting for other people to do their jobs and get us what we need. Our last home study appointment is this next week. We hope to get a report by the end of the week so we can send that last piece down with the rest of our I600A. They will send us a fingerprinting appointment. Once that's done, they will approve us, and that goes into our dossier. That process takes about a month. In the meantime, we will start notorizing in mass quantities, and wait for many more things to come in the mail. Once everything's collected, notorized and approved, we send everything to the state capital to be apostilled (the process of certifying and notorizing the notories on each document), then it's off to Eastern Europe. Travel date will come approximately five weeks after we send off the dossier. We are hoping to travel at the end of August or beginning of September! Much earlier than we expected. Pray it continues to go quickly and smoothly. Is all this insanity worth it? Yep. Every ounce of it. We can't wait to break our little man out!!