One Month Mark

Well it feels like about one year to us, but it's just been one month since we started this adoption process. We are patting ourselves on the back because we are already down to the last few tasks to put together our "dossier." We rock! We got to write our autobiographies, get fingerprinted, schedule & attend appointments with regular docs & psychologists (I even had to do the ink blot test!), go to court to clear up dog tickets, get things notarized, certified, and triple verified (OK I made up that last one), document the state of our finances, take our own self portrait and pictures of our house, dig up addtional pics of us with kids & family, and have those developed, hit up friends and family for letters of reference, mail things to various agencies, get money orders, fill out a terrible terrible form about what sort of, um, 'flaws' we would accept in a child, get employment verification letters, proof of insurance and a few other things I'm not thinking of right now.

This in the same month that we managed to rebuild part of our backyard into raised beds--involving lots of digging in hard clay & many, terrible, heavy trips hauling landscaping bricks--we also had to put Mooky the kitty down, have done a good amount of work on the terrible staircase, Mike got a grant & earned a research award, and of course our day to day jobs continue. So it's been a little hectic.

In other adoption news, it's all very anticlimactic. Basically, until your dossier is completed, nothing happens. The agency doesn't even really talk to you, they just leave you alone to get your stuff done. Nothing's really changed in Guatemala, so we should still be in good shape there.

So now we are just finalizing some last to dos and waiting for things we've sent off to return.