The Crazy Paperchase

The crazy paperchase was on!  I checked online and found out that the Secretary of State office was closed on the 26th :-(. That delayed my plans a day, but I was still hopeful that I could get everything to our agency in order to be Dossier to China (DTC) by January 4th. I ended up spending the night at a friend's house in Austin on the 26th. I was at the Secretary of State's office at 7:55 a.m. All the documents were certified successfully. I then stopped at a Fed Ex/Kinko's and made copies. Next. I drove to Houston to the Chinese Consulate. I got there during their lunch closure, so I had to wait a bit. I found this fantastic Mexican food restaurant around the corner. This was right next to a copy place. I was really glad to find the copy place because I would be needing it to copy documents after the consulate was done with them. I went back to the consulate to turn in my documents for authentication. This was super stressful. I had heard how picky they can be about the documents. The woman at the counter carefully scrutinized my stack 3 times!!!  I thought I was going to pass out. She accepted them all and told me to come back for pickup on January 2nd. I made it back home by 7. The boys hopped in the car and we headed to Amarillo to spend a few days with my family. Luckily, Chase was able to do some of that driving. I was exhausted.

On the 2nd, I got up and headed back to Houston. All documents were picked up successfully. I made the copies and put together the complete dossier packet.  Then sent it by Fed Ex for arrival to the agency on the 3rd, praying that I made no mistakes. The agency emailed me the next day to let me know that everything looked good and we would be DTC on January 4th. Success!!!!

Next is the wait for our Log In Date (LID). After we have this date, then we will be eligible to be matched. The new list is set to come out on Monday the 21st. Most families who are open to the same type of needs that we are open to do not get a referral their first month.  I emailed our agency on Tuesday, January 15th to see if we had our LID yet. The agency called me on Wednesday night and let me know that our LID is January 10th. There is more to this story, but it is not a good idea to talk about it online yet (not even in the comments on Facebook). If you see me in real life, then I will be happy to fill you in. I will be posting more as soon as I can:-). So far, I am really liking 2013.