Crazy days

Since our referral and subsequent visit with the Dr, it has been non-stop action. We have been slowly letting people know that we have a referral but have been cautious about who we tell. After reading others' accounts of comments they received after sharing their adoption plans we're taking a slow roll approach. So far the response has been positive and supporting so that's been nice.
Thursday was a long day at work with a non-stop flow of stuff to get done. I need to keep reminding myself that it is WAY better to be busy than bored. :) We're starting to research vaccinations we'll all need as we begin planning a trip to China. Lil Bubba is in an orphanage in Weinan which is in the Shaanxi province. We are excited because Weinan is outside of Xi'an, one of the early capitals of China and rich in beautiful architecture. Outside of Xi'an is also where the terracotta soldiers are so are hoping we can see them since we'll "be in the area." We certainly realize that we're not on vacation in China when we're there to get Lil Bubba, but to see the terracotta army is a unique opportunity. Time will tell.
Friday started with Veronica having a small cough - never a good sign. Another busy day at the office and then home in time to eat dinner as a family was nice. Julie talked with our pediatrician's office and setup appointments to get H1N1 and the Hepatitis vaccines for the kids next week. That should be something fun to look forward to.
Saturdays have become crazy with Upward basketball and other activities. This weekend I was off to attend the University of Scouting our local council put on for the leadership of the various packs. It was a good source of ideas and information sharing with other leaders and I was able to get signed up for Order of the Arrow again. I was impressed to see that they had my records in their database - you never know how organizations track that stuff. While I was there Julie sent a text that Veronica had a fever and that she was going to take her to the Dr. They diagnosed her with strep so that's one more thing to deal with. She took the kids to basketball and then I met her at the house so we could go to mass. I had to leave after mass to drive 2 hours north to go to work with a customer and got home around 3AM Sunday. Very long day.
Julie taught PSR Sunday AM and I worked on a big slot car track that we're building in the basement. I'll post pictures when it looks better than it does now.
Here's to hoping we get our paperwork back from the consulate soon so we can send our dossier!

Whooo-hooo! Houston, we have a referral!

Well it happened. Last night we received the call we've been waiting for. Our agency called and we reviewed the documents and pictures last night and then spoke with the director of the International Adoption Clinic at Nationwide Children's Hospital today. We've decided to accept the referral and have already sent the appropriate paperwork back to our agency. What exciting news!
Our son will turn 2 tomorrow and has a cleft palette and a repaired bilateral cleft lip. We are so happy to have a face and details on him. Because of restrictions from the CCAA we cannot post the photos yet, but will share when we can.

Thank you all for your prayer, support and help so far! We're getting closer.

It is here - it is here - our 797 is here!

Just wanted to let everyone know that after the first day back to school and work in the new year (something we all were dreading) we got some good news! I was at work when Julie sent a text page that the I-797 form we have been waiting for showed up! After work, I drove home, ate dinner and then headed back out in the snow to take it to the bank to get it notarized. We'll work on getting the certification and the rest all taken care of this week! Such good news to start off the new year - just wanted to share with everyone.

Whoo-hoo!

New Year General Update

I am not sure how to catch up on a month of activity, especially a month as busy with activity as December! Instead of a feeble attempt, I'll start with the Christmas break instead. We had a terrific Christmas with our families coming to our house to celebrate it with us. There was plenty of good food and cheer for all. We spent Christmas Eve with Julie's family and my side was here Christmas afternoon. was in good health and good spirits so it was very nice.

The kids are out of school this week and the company I work for is shutdown for an end of year expense reduction measure so we all enjoyed the week. Saturday was a hoot as we were getting ready for Sydney's birthday party for family. I had been asked by Sydney to bake my carrot cake and got it all mixed up and ready to put in the oven when I noticed that the oven had sparks inside and a white-hot glowing ember from the heating element shorting out. I hit the breaker and took the cakes to Mom and Dad's house to finish them in the oven and see if we can get their new laptop connected to the Internet. Long story short, two totally disfigured cakes - no clues what went wrong there - and two calls to India and the Philippines and no luck on either task. :( I had to get home to go to mass. Julie's sister Janet was kind enough to bake a new cake for Sydney. We went to mass, picked up the pizza and came home to have her party. It was nice and we got some more good use from our Flip video camera. After back to back to back parties - 3 days, 3 parties at our house, we were whipped.


Sunday was a total sloth day. The rule was that nobody did anything other than watch TV, play games and have fun. We don't get to do that very often and it was nice to be able to literally "do nothing." Monday was spent being less lazy and featured such fun events as laundry, running the vacuum, doing dishes, etc. Don't get me wrong, we lazed around quite a bit too but some productivity was realized. Neither Julie or I had adoration this week so that meant even less reason to do anything.


Tuesday we went out and hit the library for the kids. We then went to Olive Garden for lunch - nobody wanted Indian except Julie and I - go figure - what is wrong with these kids!? We enjoyed lunch there with a bit of excitement as Veronica somehow managed to push her chair over backwards. Thank God she wasn't hurt and she enjoyed her spaghetti and meatball. Max is turning into quite the cleaner as he ate his kid's meal and polished off Sydney and Veronica's. Time to move that buy to the full size meals, we think! We then went to the Polaris mall to see if we could exchange some clothes for the right size. No real surprise, but neither store we went to had what we needed. Julie is on a quest for a Mom's calendar that has a line for each child. We had one last year that had 5 lines, but we're hoping and praying that this year we'll need one with six. We checked at the calendar places in the mall as well as Barnes and Noble to no success. She ended up ordering one on-line so we've covered. After the mall we went to Costco for a quick trip and then headed home, exhausted from a long, hard day! LOL! This being lazy thing is kinda of nice.

Wednesday we had been planning to take the girls to see the new Disney movie while Max and I went to Dave and Busters to play video games. Everything was going according to plan until we dropped the girls off at the theater and headed across the street to the bank. Julie called and said that the movie was sold out to a school group and that Sydney was crying and the next showing wasn't for 3 hours. Max and I picked them up and we went to another theater nearby that was showing the same movie in 50 minutes. We shuffled our plans a bit and ended up reversing the plan where I ran into Best Buy and grabbed the cables we needed to connect the Wii to the component inputs and reconnect the DVD/VCR to the TV. Julie dropped off the guys and then they hit the movie. All's well that ends well and everyone had fun killing things at Dave and Busters and watching princesses kiss frogs. Sounds like the movie is a bit darker than it needs to be and has voodoo and junk like that in it, but the girls didn't seem to notice or more importantly, remember it. We headed home with another successful adventure under our belts.

Thursday was my men's Bible study group and I had to set the alarm to get up even though we moved the normal start time from 6AM to 7AM. This doesn't bode well for next week does it! We had a surprise snowfall last night and the roads were horrible until I got to the freeway. Oh winter how I love thee, huh? After our group was over I came home and Julie left to get her hair cut. The kinds and I enjoyed another lazy day at home and Max and I are getting pretty good at Super Mario Brothers Wii! As it was New Year's Eve we had our traditional picnic in the basement as we rang in the New Year (in London that is - we can't stay up until midnight no matter how lazy we want to be!)

Friday we went to mass and then over to Mom and Dad for Max and I to get haircuts. We visited with them and then headed back to the house to prepare for Sydney's birthday party for her friends from school which will be tomorrow. We all worked together as a team to clean to house, bake cupcakes and get it all done in time to watch the Buckeyes play Oregon in the Rose Bowl. It was a great game and always fun to watch your team win. ;)

We woke up this morning early to start to get back into the groove - that was hard. While the girls were sitting on the couch, Sydney started vomiting. She's now on the couch with a fever of 102 and has vomited a few more times. Needless to say, we've cancelled the birthday party and will have to re-schedule for a new day. Poor Sydney, she is our bell weather for illness and if there is a new and exciting bug around, she's one of the first to get it. This is one of the more concerning aspects for our trip to China, assuming we all get to go. It'll all work out I'm sure but is tough to plan for. Do we do trip insurance and make sure we have a policy that will allow us to cancel some of the travelers? What about H1N1 or some new exciting derivative that might originate in China? Pray, pray and pray some more, huh?

Now that you are caught up, I wanted to make sure we hit some other high points from December.


I finally finished my 3rd and final chapter for the book. They will be submitted to technical edit next week then I'll have to address whatever loose ends there are and we'll be done - I hope!

I had a chance to have lunch with my good friends Mike and Mark that I have not had a chance to see in a long time!

We had a radon removal system installed in the house to get the levels down to a safer number.

The kids enjoyed playing in the first major snowfall of the season and like any good brother, a snowball was in order. ;)



















New Year's resolutions - lose weight and learn Chinese - possibly pick up Karate and convince Julie to do some Tae Chi or something (Karate so we can have butt kicking tournaments in the house) ;)

New Year Adoption Update

Wow, have I been negligent or what? The last update on this blog was 11/14/09 and it is now 1/2/10!!! We have made some exciting progress and let's all pretend it is December. ;)

We've received our VOE letter from the notary in California and submitted it to the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco. They've already authenticated it and returned it, so we're good on the dossier front! That is the last piece of paperwork we needed to gather/collect ourselves so we're 90% complete - how exciting is that?! Additionally, USCIS got back with us and Julie and I had our fingerprint appointment on Dec 10. They were very, very efficient and we were in and out in 15 minutes at the most. My dad had agreed to watch Veronica and go pickup Sydney so it was a pretty crazy schedule to coordinate dropping off the kids at school, taking Veronica to gymnastics, going to mom and dad's to drop off the van, heading downtown to USCIS, etc. Since our pals at USCIS were so efficient Julie and I had time to eat lunch together so we went to one of our favorite Indian restaurants downtown and had lunch. Mmmmmm, Indian. (Read this in Homer Simpson's voice and it is funnier.) With the fingerprinting done, we are back in a hurry up and wait game with USCIS. The next step is for them to complete our file and mail - via snail mail, a form called a 797-C. This will literally be Little Bubba's ticket to becoming a US Citizen and is like gold - we can't/don't want to lose the original. Once we get it, we need to make a notarized copy of it and walk it through the whole process again - county, state and consular authentication. The good news is that we're getting pretty good at that part. The bad news, that'll all take time, especially the Chinese consulate part so we can only hope and pray that this document will get the same speedy turnaround that the others did! Then, and only then, will we be in a position to submit our dossier to our agency. Once there, it'll be double-checked and sent to China for translation and submission to CCAA (China Center of Adoption Affairs). We're getting close, people!

So that's where we stand today, waiting for the letter from USCIS. As we've been waiting through December every trip to the mail box has been one of anticipation and disappointment when we see the letter isn't there. We really have no expectation of how long it will take for the letter to arrive so all we can do is hope and pray. In the mean time, we're as prepared as we can be and have all of the copies of every document, notarization, state certification and consular authentication made for the agency's file as well as the copy to take with us to China.

Try, try, try again

It has been a while since we've updated the blog and there is a lot to share. We've made significant progress in some areas and seem to be stuck in a "Groundhog Day" time loop, or a Star Trek temporal loop for others. We'll start with the positive and go from there.

First and foremost, all of our documents are back from the Chinese Embassy in Washington DC and Consulate in New York! Now for the caveat - without really thinking about it, we sent the consulate my verification of employment letter, which originated in California. As the Consulate in New York does not have jurisdiction over California documents, they sent it back letting us know we needed to send it to the Consulate in California. We sent it to California with a new money order and supporting documents but it came back yesterday stating that the notary in California needed to notarize the actual document. She had filled out a form called an All Purpose Acknowledgement which is a separate piece of paper. The Consulate didn't like that so now we need to send it back to her to get the actual letter notarized and have it filled in properly. Details, details, details...

We also had submitted our I800A to USCIS and received it back approximately a week later with a note that it was missing a page. I called USCIS and spoke with someone who was obviously not going to be able to help me and after 20 frustrating minutes of non-sense with her, she finally mentioned that her computers were down. Even if she had the ability to help me, she wouldn't have been able to look anything up! We could have saved 20 minutes of time and frustration if she mad mentioned that up front. *sigh* Julie and I reviewed and re-reviewed the form and found that we had not sent a page that was supposed to be signed by a person if they prepared the form rather than the parents. Silly us - we figured since we prepared the form we didn't need to include a page that wasn't signed but the computer that scanned our form in didn't agree. We sent it back the next morning and hoped we were done. A week later it came back from USCIS again stating that the date on the check was wrong and we needed to send a more current one. Apparently when I filled out the check I put in 02 as the year rather than 09. Julie filled out a new check and FedExed it back off to Texas. Apparently her writing is way better than mine because I logged into our checking account this morning and saw that the check had cleared so we assume we are now "in process" at USCIS!

Next steps will be to get the Letter of Verification of Employment back to CA to be notarized (again) and then send it back to the Chinese Consulate in CA for certification. We're also waiting for the USCIS to send us a letter for our fingerprinting appointment downtown. After that is completed, we'll wait for our I-797C to come back and then we get to make a copy of it, get it notarized, state certified and off to the Chinese Consulate in NY for certification. Once these stars all align, we're ready to send our dossier (all of this paperwork) to the agency and then off to China. The end of this part of the road is in sight, but we're not there yet!

Paperwork on top of paperwork

It has been a crazy two weeks for us, as expected. :) Our grand scheme of getting the application letter notarized while I was out of town missed an important point - I was out of town so the notary couldn't stamp it if she didn't see me sign it. Julie was the one who pointed that out while I was in Raleigh. So much for that plan! LOL! Saturday morning we headed to the local bank to get the document notarized to find that the one on staff at the time has the same last name as us though no relation. We don't want to create a situation where anything might look improper, especially in China, so we hit the branch at the local Kroger to get it notarized. I think the teller thought we were a family of stalkers or something when I asked her where she lived (in the context of needing to know which county to take it to get certified). Pretty funny as she was a young single woman so was a bit taken aback. I hated to break it to her, but even though I am a hot commodity, I am off the market so she'll have to keep looking for love elsewhere. :)


After the bank I wanted to drive Julie downtown so she'd know where to go to get the documents certified by the Secretary of State. On the way we decided that Schmidt's sounded like an excellent plan for lunch so we enjoyed the buffet and Julie enjoyed her vegetarian Reuben. Dessert at Schmidt's can't be missed and the German chocolate cake, coconut creme pie and chocolate silk pie were right on the money. We had just enough time to go home, grab the gift for the birthday party Sydney was going to while we went to mass at St. Mary's. It was a lightning mass as the Father didn't have a homily prepared since one of the deacons was supposed to do it, but couldn't at the last minute. Julie, Max, Veronica and I went to Meijer in Delaware to buy some jeans for me and then went to pick up Sydney. We went home, ate and hit the sack - a busy, but fun and productive, day for sure.


Sunday we worked on getting all of our documents in order, packaged into FedEx envelopes and the getting the return envelopes ready, too. The Consulate requires we copy every page of every document we send including the county and state certifications and fill out a form with what we are asking them to do, in our case authentication that the bundle of papers is legit and proper. I've read on-line that you can send up to 10 documents in a single envelope but am sticking by the form and only doing 5 per envelope - we don't want to give them any pause or delay in processing our documents. We went to the local truck stop to get the money orders we'd need for the Chinese Consulate and sealed 2 envelopes with 10 documents. Julie will take the last two, our home study and application letter downtown for certification between picking Sydney up from school and picking Max up from school.


Julie had an excellent idea to take the kids to the local Pumpkin Patch Sunday afternoon so after PSR we got everyone ready and took off to do the hayride, pet the critters and pick out pumpkins. We had beautiful weather and had a good time. We decided that we'd get a big pumpkin for the family as normally I carve the pumpkins with the kids while Julie is at adoration, but this week it was carve them Sunday night or never. We picked the perfect pumpkin and on the way home decided that it was too nice of a day to not take the car for a spin. We got home and packed everyone into the Mondial and went for a Sunday drive. The two girls shared a seat belt so Julie was on nerves the whole time but it was a blast. We went down Hogback road which was beautiful with the trees and water on the west side. We took North Old State up into Kilbourne and kept on it until we picked up North Galena to head home. The kids love the horn and we had fun honking at horses and cows in the field and watching them jerk their heads up as we passed. We came home, washed the car - yes, it was THAT nice - and started dinner and wrapped the evening up. Max and I finished Star Trek - First Contact and then it was time for him to hit the hay. Julie and I watched The Amazing Race and called it a night - the alarm will be going off earlier than we want it to tomorrow.



Monday comes and Ron is off to Raleigh and Julie does her morning routine. Today is extra crazy for her as she drops the older two off at school, goes to the County Clerk of Courts and gets the application letter certified. Then she's off to Veronica's music class before she's back to school and picking up Sydney. The girls braved downtown and found a good spot to park and walk to the Secretary of State and get the documents certified there, too. Then she jets home, makes the needed copies for the Chinese Consulate and heads back to the school to pickup Max. They drop off the envelopes to FedEx and we're in transit for our I-800A form to USCIS and 3 envelopes to the Chinese Consulate in New York. We are told that it will take 20 days for the documents to get back from the Consulate and no real ETA on the I-800A. We are waiting for government employees to do their job now.


While in Raleigh, I get emails from FedEx that the documents have all been delivered so that is a step in the right direction. I also get an email that says Julie's birth certificate is back from the Department of State! Whoo-hoo! More envelopes to send!


I get back home Friday night and Saturday morning spend time getting Julie's birth certificate ready to send to the Chinese Embassy, not the Consulate, because it originated in Maryland we had to get the US Department of State certification which means that the Embassy in Washing DC needs to authenticate it, not the Consulate - or so we're told. We pickup a money order for it and we're ready to send more on Monday.


Saturday is trick or treat day so we headed out to Noodles and Company for lunch so the kids can get Zombie glasses and then we go to the Genoa fire station for their annual open house and Halloween festival. They put on such a good deal for the kids with bounce houses, mazes, fire engines, letting them hold a fire hose and more. It was a good time for sure!

We have just enough time to get to St. John Neumann for mass. After mass we're off to see Julie's sister, Janet. She gave each of the kids fun toys. Afterwards we head home and watch Monsters vs. Aliens - The Mutant Pumpkins before it is time for the girls to go to bed. Max, Julie and I watch Big Bang Theory before Max hits the hay and then Julie and I get caught up on Survivor. Two weeks away really gets us behind on our shows. :)