The Ups and Downs of a Paper Pregnancy

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah!  That's how I'm feeling about all this paper stuff right now.  Wed. of this week I was all gung-ho about getting our dossier stuff together.  It amounts to more than 20 pages of documents telling everything about us like our birth and marriage certificates, letters from Lowell's employer, our bank, our Dr, our friends, a copy of the 1st page of our taxes (and a copy of our extension form since we haven't actually filed our 2006 taxes yet...  ahem...), our home study, a Thai adoption application (in English, not Thai!!!) some other licenses and stuff from our adoption agency and whatever. 

 

Some of it we had to have notarized.  I was REALLY excited when I found out there was a Regional CA State Dept. office in Fresno because that meant we didn't have to send everything to Sacramento to be certified.  SO.  Lowell took it all down to the office and found out he had to take it to the county clerk first to verify the notary's license and signature.  Then he took it back.  Now we have a state seal certificating the county clerk's seal certifying that the notary was certified to verify our signatures on our dossier.  You'd think that was enough, right???  Well, now we get to send it all to Washington DC for the US Dept. of State to certify and then it will go to the Royal Thai Embassy (also in DC...  we'll hire a courier to walk it to these places for us) to have the US State Dept. certification verified.

 

Are you confused yet???  It's just making me tired today b/c I thought we were going to be able to skip the DC part of it until I discovered today that the Thai law changed LAST MONTH saying now it does.

 

Interestingly enough, God and I wrote another song over the course of the last couple of weeks and it's all about "counting it all joy."  I don't have time to type out all the words right now (and I've already made you read enough!) but whenever I think about the song, it reminds me to count everything as joy.  EVERYTHING.  Even the fact that if we'd gotten this done a month ago it would (supposedly) be a simpler process.  Who knows?  (God.)  I have been trusting God all along to help us get our paperwork done at just the right time so that we will be in just the right place on the waiting list when our child's name is at the top of the other list.  And this is probably just part of that process.  Or maybe it's just developing perseverance.  But no matter what, I can count it all joy. 

 

So if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go find some joy and praise God He's gotten us this far down the road.  We're almost done with the paper part (I think) and will soon start just waiting.  And I'm sure I'm gonna need some perseverance and joy for that.  : )  Bye!