Light at the End of the Paperwork Tunnel

This week I was going through our Dossier guide, which is intended to help lead us through the complex process of paperwork gathering, notarizing, certifying and authenticating, and realized that I was reading the last page of the packet, meaning we are VERY close to completing our dossier!  The only thing we are now waiting on is to be fingerprinted for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in Aurora next Monday, then our I-800A approval should arrive within 2-3 weeks, at which point our dossier will be translated and sent on to China.  Once it's in China and approved, we can finally be matched with our sweet little boy.

Here is a snapshot of the most recent dossier documents we received back from the Department of State and Chinese Consulate in D.C.   I'm just glad these weren't lost in the mail after we spent the past 3 months obtaining them!  Whew!

...and our first official documents containing Chinese characters ("hanzi").  Who knows what it says.

Things are seeming a little more exciting and we are really looking forward to this feeling more real - like there is an actual child who we will be blessed with at the end of this whole crazy process.  A little boy who will someday become part of our family, run around our living room with his big sister and stand on our front porch, squirting the hose on the garden and getting messy with popsicles in the summer.  We hope we can give him a life that many other children from his orphanage will sadly never know.  They all deserve a loving family, and we cannot wait to be that family for one little child.  

"Adopting one child will not change the world,

   But for that one child, the world will change."  

- unknown