We passed!

Score. We are one step closer to Little Miss Eileen! Our social worker came this morning and talked to us, gave us some more paperwork to fill out and then checked out the house. She also talked to us a little bit more about the international side of the process and the classes we'll take with the home study agency later on this summer. We're really glad to be working with somebody who is understanding and helpful because (as we told her) we'd heard a lot of home study agency horror stories lately. It was also nice to hear some encouragement about adopting from the country Eileen's in... it's notoriously tumultuous and often frustrating because of all the changes they make to the process. But we'll get through it and we'll have support through the agency afterward if we need it.

Ok, I don't know about you all, but I'm ready for a list of what's left to do paperwork-wise. Here goes:

-State police clearance (going Monday for fingerprints)

-FBI child abuse clearance (going Monday for fingerprints)

-Send application to USCIS for fingerprint date and orphan immigration approval (cannot do until home study is complete/printed/in-hand)

-Get cats updated on shots and send those records to the social worker

-Fill out financial background and send to the social worker

-Write individual autobiographies and send to the social worker

-Get a letter/statement of Wylie's general health and his immunization record print out (will call Monday to add to our other medical stuff we're picking up)

-Pick up medical forms from Dr's office (hopefully this week)

And last, but not least:

-Get ALL finished paperwork sent to Indianapolis for apostille.

Once that's all done, we can mail our dossier off! Well, once we do some fundraising too. More on that this coming week. Tomorrow's my 29th birthday and I'll be taking the day off from adoption paperwork and enjoying my two favorite boys, Dan and Wylie. We're due for some stress-free family time!

Happy Friday the 13th!

Luckiest. Day. EVER. We got our apostilled Child Specific Petitions (CSPs)and Power of Attorney (POA) forms back from Indianapolis today. This is especially exciting because they just left my hands on Monday. Now we're just waiting on the rest of the paperwork we sent in separate batches to arrive. Our stateside coordinator approved the CSPs and POAs to be sent overseas as soon as we can shuffle ourselves over to DHL! :)

Our home study visit is in the morning! Wish us luck. We're so nervous. There's probably no reason we'd outright fail it, but ya just never know what to expect when you're new to a crazy process like adoption. We'll update after our visit is over to let you know if we survived. ;) Ha.

On a bad note, our blog host (Blogger) had a system-wide failure on May 11th and was down until today, meaning they lost posts and comments made during May 11th and 12th. If you think you may have commented during this time and are waiting on a reply, please check and see if your original comment is still "alive". If it happened to get swept away in the Blogger crash, feel free to re-post it or email us and we'll get back to ya as soon as possible.

Tornado Tuesday

Crazy day today! And it wasn't just the weather. Wylie had a hearing test and he totally didn't want any part of it. He was so mad at mama for making him hold still for the doctor. Apparently despite the fact I used to muscle around horses, I don't do so hot holding an angry toddler who doesn't want his ears checked. :\ So anyhow, we have to go back in a week and try one more test -- hopefully he'll be able to sleep thru it this time! Fingers crossed.

After his failed audiologist visit, he went to visit Grammy Vicki so I could run to the county court house and get copies of our marriage license. My odyssey to the court house basement (which was leaking because of all the rain) only cost $10! Woo! The county clerk even put everything in an envelope so her ink stamps wouldn't get smudged on the trek back out to the car. Foreign governments don't mess around when it comes to messy stamping and I'd hate to have to come back and re-do everything. But don't worry -- I checked all the clerk's stamps again when I got to the car and there is no smeared/missing/overlapping/double stamped text, so we should be good to go on that! If only getting copies of Dan's birth certificate had been that easy. Note to the state of Wisconsin: for what we paid and the hoops we jumped thru, we'd better not be getting that same xerox of a copy of a mimeograph of a faded papyrus you handed out when he was born... ugh. I expect something legible and much more legal/official looking this time! Ha ha.

The next and final mandatory stop for the day was to the BMV to get dad's Jeep re-titled. My mom signed it over to us last week (which helps us out because we'll have plenty of room for 2 kids and their stuff now). So I met up with Dan and we did that. Yay for online appointment scheduling! After we got our temp plate, we went next door to Tuesday Morning to pick up a couple of girly goodies. Dan got a kick out of the not-so-girly tutus they had on sale. I think those are on his shopping list so that we don't have a house full of pink when Eileen gets here ;) Honestly, my mom made sure I had purple or blue instead of pink growing up, so I can't say I'm really attached to that color and don't blame him for wanting something different.

We ran over to my mom's to pick up Wylie and collected an awesome rocking chair. My mom's friend gave it to her after she had me. It's the same color as Eileen's crib that we got on sale last week, so it'll be perfect in her room! Dan and I are very happy to have it. We managed to get home before the bad storms hit St. Joe county where our parents all live. They had been under a tornado watch since around lunch time. When we got to Elkhart, the sun peeked out and Wylie got to run around the yard. Glad all the hail/wind passed us by!

Ain't no moss on me!

As in the ball/stone is rolling. Our first home study visit will be May 14th and we have physicals set for May 5th. Eep! Any advice for a home study child proofing check sheet? We have gates and cabinet locks and safety devices on the appliances, but you never know what each person's standards are until they actually get to your house. Thankfully we'll have a second visit to correct any issues our social worker sees the first time around.

I have a list of paperwork to go collect. We have our birth certificates. Dan's passport is en route. We really can't go get much of our dossier paperwork notarized until Dan's passport number gets here because that number appears on the top of most of the paperwork. Bummer!

Busy Weekend

Whew! We were busy bees Saturday and Sunday. I rearranged Wylie's room a bit to make it easier to move around in there. We worked on the blog template. We organized our receipts and paperwork that we've done so far into a binder. And our home study social worker got our application documents to us, so we filled all of those out. Several friends and a couple of relatives have graciously agreed to act as our references (THANK YOU!!! xoxo). So first thing Monday morning we'll be sending out the first installment of our home study fees, after which time our social worker will set up our first meeting. We're looking forward to working with her. She seems very reassuring and explains everything well. That's exactly what we need, because I'm sure the going will get tough at some point.

This morning one of our cars sold on eBay. That should help us pay for some of our document fees while we're working on our home study and dossier. We plan to apply for grants and adoption scholarships once our home study is complete, but we still need to come up with other fundraising strategies. I'm thinking maybe we'll try a yard/bake sale in my mom's neighborhood to start. We did two yard sales last year at our place -which went great- but at the time we were just doing them to have some extra cash. Now our goal is a little bigger, so we'll have to think bigger also. We've been haunting the Reece's Rainbow message board and there are some great ideas. Time to get cracking.

In the last post I mentioned that Eileen's "real" name isn't Eileen. One of our friends asked what that meant. It's more of an alias. Each child that goes up for international adoption in Eileen's country is given a different name from what's on their birth certificate to protect their identity while they are listed for potential parents to choose. We probably won't have any idea what her birth name is/was for quite some time. So for our purposes we'll continue to call our little girlie Eileen until we legally adopt her. Once we're officially her parents, we'll start using which ever name we pick out for her. We're totally open to suggestions, by the way! Before we knew Wylie was a boy, we had a HUGE list of girl names and basically zero boy names. Now none of the names we liked before seem to fit Eileen. Funny how that works out, huh?