Dossier Go Time!

I am very glad to announce that our Dossier is finished! But what a finish it was. The Dossier is comprised of 13 documents that are sent to China for China's approval. One such document is our state criminal background check and fingerprints. Well ours...expired. Nice, eh? I think I might have thrown up in the back of my mouth just a little when my case worker informed me of this. But she quickly let me know that I could get a local background check from one of the local police departments and they can write a letter, one for each Eric and I, that says we have no current criminal history. So I'm thinking, whew, just get a simple letter. Well our first police department doesn't do such a letter, the second I contacted can do the letter but can't give me a time frame for completion but they assured me it was likely to be less that two weeks. So the third try is always the charm right...yes, right! So thank you Shelby County Sheriff's Office and your staff in the records department! God love these people they did it for me in like 3o minutes! The only catch was that Eric and I both had to be present and it was a 40 minute drive away; oh and both of my children were conveniently OUT of school and with us. However, my children did great and the drive wasn't all that bad and in the end we had our letters saying that we had not committed any crimes in Shelby County. Here is where I must laugh. China will accept a local background check over a national FBI check. Understand that it is the national FBI check over all 50 states that expired, but to remedy that, a one county check will suffice. How many freakin' counties do you think there are in the entire U.S. of A.?So I could have robbed several banks just one county over and it wouldn't matter. I love China.

So now we wait. The Dossier is being authenticated as I type and then it will go through translation and then it will be sent to China; or maybe it gets translated in China, not sure and don't really care. Authentication takes 2-3 weeks. Once authenticated it takes like 3 days for it to get to China and then 2-3 weeks for us to get logged in. If I haven't harped on this enough, it is that log in date (LID) that we want...soon as we get the LID we can start looking for our child. Apparently our social worker has a few in mind for us already which is why she was so encouraging about us getting the Dossier completed yesterday. They have a surplus of boys right now in their system and so she asked me if we still were willing to take a boy, to which I replied..."Yes. Of course." However, the decision is not mine, it's up to God and we are trusting him to clearly reveal to us upon sight which child he has chosen for us. What I mean is that when we both see the child, we will both know, we won't haggle over which we prefer, we will just know our child when we see him/her. AAAAAAHHHHHHHH, it's so exciting and terrifying. Some days I'm like, "What the crap am I doing?! What if this new child totally screws up my other children?! What if s/he is a holy terror and it is just all wrong!?" Then, I hear the voice of my Lord saying to me, "Rest. I got this. I know what I'm doing; even if you don't know what you're doing." Sigh. Thank you Jesus.