Anybody there?

OK, so I know some of you are wondering what is going on with our adoption. Well, I'll sum it up for you... I dunno! haha

We're waiting to hear where our paperwork is and I'll let you know as soon as I hear back from our coordinator. She's been really swamped and with the holiday weekend, I'm sure she's been overloaded.

Vocab. lesson #2 coming soon... what words would you like to learn?

Vocabulary Lesson 1

Thought it would be fun to share some of the words we are learning. Our agency sent us a little booklet on a bunch of useful words. Would you like to learn some Russian? :)

These are the pronunciation of Russian words,
not their Russian alphabetical spelling.

Mother = Mama
Father = Papa
Grandmother = Ba-BOO-shka
Grandfather = Dye-DOO-shka
Aunt = TYAWT ya
Uncle = DYAA da

Numbers:
One = ah-DYEEN ----- Two = dva
Three = dryee --------- Four = chi-TYEER-ui
Five = pyaty ----------- Six = shehsty
Seven = syehmy ------ Eight = VOH-syimy
Nine = DYEH-byit --- Ten =DYEH-syit

pah-KAH! (bye-bye)

Update

Got to Tallahassee in great time. Took care of the documents in great time. Went to UPS store and copied papers and sent to our agency (which they've received already) and had a great time. Had Panera Bread coffee for my drive back and it was great. So, Praise God, everything worked out Grreeeat!
(Haven't seen or heard anything about the first set of documents I mailed to Tallahassee, but that's no matter now anyway.)

I've been reviewing the estimate of the remainder of our costs. Praise God, He's provided for us in wonderful ways thus far. I can't wait to see how He'll provide the rest for us! It looks like we'll need approximately $25,000 more for the costs of things such as the country fees, Visas, child's medical, paperwork misc. fees. We'll also need an estimated $11,000 for travel and meal expenses (for both trips). Sounds like a huge number, but I trust God to supply everything, whether it be through gifts and/or through work. He's trustworthy.

Thanks for checking in!

On the road again....

Thanks to our Florida Director of Social Work, we were able to get duplicates of those pages I sent to Tallahassee last week. I will be driving to Tallahassee tomorrow in order to get them apostilled. I figure it will be faster this way since the state office said things are moving slower than usual for the mailed in papers. I might not get those back until end of next week or even the following, if I get them back at all! They only take a few minutes to apostille in person, so that's why I'm just gonna go.

That's the latest!

Sudden Meltdown!

Well, it was bound to happen. I goofed. Probably not "tragically" but when there's a lot of time lost, and potentially some money lost, that's a catastrophe for me.

After we sent our Dossier to our Agency, everything looked great. Our Family Coordinator confirmed we were "expecting". :) Thanks for everyone's congrats! Then we got an email saying that we needed two more documents to clarify why there were two different "Director of Social Work" people. You see, just before we finished the dossier, our local director left and a new director stepped in. (Agency is trying to be efficient with money and can only pay for a director as needed and the previous woman needed work full-time.) So, now we have the Home Study by the original director, and other paperwork signed by the new one.

The agency thought it would prevent confusion if there was a letter stating what happened along with the copy of the previous license. It makes total sense. Hassle is that they had to be notarized and with a notary comes and an apostille. Rather than make the drive to Tallahassee again, I decided to overnight the papers, along with a cover letter that had our phone # and address on it, plus a check. They ask that you also include a Pre-paid package so they can send it back to you.

I had the bright idea to have it sent straight to our agency, rather than come back here, just for me to send it to them. So, I took everything to the courier service office and asked if I could pre-pay for an overnight letter envelope from Tallahassee to Virginia, for the apostille office to use to return our paperwork when it was finished.

Here's my first mistake. In my rush, I hadn't re-read the State's website saying it would take 5-7 workdays.

The courier service doesn't offer a pre-paid envelope (maybe if I had an account with them), but instead, offered another way of sending it. It's actually quite confusing and I'm not sure how the driver handles this, but the guy behind the counter assured me it would be fine. I put our paperwork, clipped to an empty, unlabeled courier envelope (I put a sticky-note on it saying it belonged to me) into a larger envelope that would be overnighted to Tallahassee. Then the courier has it in their system to check back to the office in Tallahassee for three days to pickup the unlabeled envelope that was supposed to hold the apostilled documents. The courier is supposed to have the overnight label for Virginia delivery ready to attach to it.

Did you see my first mistake? Website said it would take 5-7 workdays and my courier is supposed to check for 3 days.....

What's my second mistake? Again, after re-reading the state's website, I remembered that I was supposed to indicate which country the apostilles were for... I hadn't mentioned that in the cover letter.

Could it BE any worse. Well, there's one more.... I didn't put the Virginia office address anywhere in the cover letter, so IF they decide to mail back our paperwork, they will probably send it regular mail (so slow), and it will have to come back to me, if it gets back to me.

So, I was checking the Courier's tracking page and noticed (no surprise) that it's been 2 days of trying, and no getting my package. It would be a miracle if the office did finish it and got it to the courier for Virginia. The lady over the phone said they get hundreds of apostille requests a day.

Ever slap your palm to your forehead and say "stupid, stupid, stupid". Well, let's just say my forehead is pretty red...