Strange Dreams

I had a weird dream last night that our agency rep met us outside of someones house in their driveway and told us that someone from the agency would be calling to give us a heads up about "Cody". (in my dream I knew that Cody was the baby we were going to adopt although the name Cody isn't very Russian, so I don't know where I got that name) They told me that even though we are travelling blind to Russia they always give their military families advance notice of their referrals. I tried to explain that we are no longer military but they said that was okay and would let us know about Cody. They also told us that we need to be open to all forms of adoption (international and domestic) and to keep an open mind. I walked into this strange house and a pregnant lady was sitting on a bar stool smoking a cigarette. She was talking to a lady that I knew in my dream and told her that this pregnancy was a surprise and how it was going to mess up her plans and that she had just got her life on track again and she wanted to put the baby up for adoption. She turned to me and asked me if I knew anyone that would want to adopt a baby. I started crying and couldn't talk and the lady that I knew told the pregnant woman that we had been trying for 7 years to get pregnant and would love to adopt the baby. The woman put her cigarette out and I managed to stop crying long enough to say, "And I don't even smoke or drink or do drugs". The next scene was in the operating room and the baby was being born but it had it's umbilical cord coming out of it's back and the umbilical cord looked like the breathing hole/tube of the squid creature in Pirates of the Caribbean. The doctor assured us it was a routine operation to remove a back umbilical cord and then the dream ended with us having the domestic baby and we had "Cody" our Russian son.

I have no idea what that dream means other than I should obviously not eat so many Milk Duds and Slim Jims before bedtime. :-) Any dream experts out there care to take a crack at my dream!? Haa Haa!

In real adoption news...we are still waiting for immigration services to send us a finger print appointment. Our dossier should be in Russia right now and being translated. It might make it in time to get registered before the Russian government closes for Christmas but if not, we are not concerned. We are confident that all the timing will work out for the best. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and that Santa was good to you. Christmas next year should look and sound very different for so many of us!!!

Paper Pregnant!

I feel a bit of nausea coming on and maybe a craving or two! Our dossier is on a jet plane and officially on its journey. We went to Austin today and had all our paperwork apostilled. What a piece of cake that was!!! I feel silly now to have worried so much about getting our paperwork apostilled. We were there by 8:30 and were out within 30 minutes. We are lucky that Texas puts a cap on the fees for adoptive parents. They reduce the rate for adoptive parents to $10/form but cap it at $100. Otherwise it would have cost us $380 so I guess we'll have to thank the TX government for that one. They also gave us a form to hold on to for the future. If we need any additional paperwork apostilled it won't cost us anything since we hit the $100 limit already. Here's a rather cheesy picture of me holding the "baby" before it was on its way. (sorry the camera phone pic is not the greatest)

After we finished the apostilles we went 1/2 mile over to Fed Ex and mailed our "baby" to our agency and sent our home study to San Antonio to Immigration Services so we can complete our I600A. It cost us $60 to mail everything! Good gracious. Most of it was 3 pounds of dossier paperwork! That's how much it weighed on the scale. The doctor says its measuring right on track for this part of the pregnancy. :)

We had so much time to spare that we went over to Babies R Us and perused the store. We looked at cribs, played with strollers and checked out all the high tech gadgets they have out now to monitor the baby sleeping. They've got some night vision systems for baby monitors that rival what Randy uses to fly the Apache helicopter at night. They sure have come a long way since we were kids.

So now the wait begins for "The Call" letting us know when we are going to travel. Right now the plan is for us to travel to the Moscow region the end of January but our agency said if they have an appropriate referral in another region before that they would call and discuss that with us. We've been well taken care of so far, so we aren't worried about the wait. We're in good hands.

We Got It!!

Five copies of our glorious home study is in our hot little hands! Tonight we will finish the last of the dossier paperwork that required information from our home study, Thursday we will have everything notarized and Friday we'll go to Austin and have everything apostilled! I spoke with our agency today and they said we are still on track to get everything submitted before the courts close in Russia for the holidays. Hot diggity!

Now if Tiger and Kar's home study could get to them, we'd all be doing good!

Possibly Friday??

I spoke with our home study agency today and they still have not been able to do any work on our home study. They did say they will try to make it a priority and get it to us by Friday. I'm not going to sweat it, since I know the timing is out of our hands anyway and I've really taken your kind comments to heart about this delay. I know this timing is not ours and someone with a much better handle on the situation is in control!!

In other news, we put our Christmas tree up this weekend. Actually, I put up four trees; our 9 foot formal tree in the living room, our 6 foot family tree in the family room, and two small trees, one is Randy's tree and its all aviator themed ornaments and the other is my tree which is all teacher ornaments complete with yellow ruler garland. I completely understand that this compulsive disorder will have to be put on hold once a baby/toddler enters our home, but for now let me obsess! :-) Here is a picture of our themed trees.

Anyway back to the story, we got our formal tree up and it only gets very specific, color-coordinated, red or gold only, ornaments on it. (Randy loves that about me, ha ha) Years ago Randy's brother worked for Disney in Orlando and bought us three of the cutest Mickey head ornaments. They are just the 3-D shape of the head, all smooth glass, no facial details, kind of an abstract Mickey, and he had both our names put on two of them. The third ornament he left blank for our future child. We've never hung it before but this weekend I finally took it out of the box and told Randy, "This one is for the baby, we don't know them yet, but they already have a place in our hearts and a spot on the tree. This is for you baby Steen." It felt so good to do that! Next year will be even better when there will be a name on that ornament!!

I've Got Frustration in Me

"I've got frustration in me"...one of my favorite lines from the Junie B. Jones books that I read to my students. Unfortunately, it describes me to a T right now. I should be typing a blog that is titled, "Paper Pregnant" but not so. Our home study was promised to be in our hands by Dec 1st and as of close of business today Dec 6th, we do not have our finished home study. We had planned to go to Austin this past Tuesday and have everything apostilled and Fed Ex'd to our agency by now. I picked up our rough draft last Friday and fixed all the errors in it over the weekend. It was under the home study agency front mat by 7:00 am Monday morning and it currently sits in their office without any work having been done to it. Grrr...

I don't know what to do. All our dossier paperwork is finished except the few items that require details about our home study. If I had it today we could be in Austin tomorrow getting everything apostilled. I guess we are just stuck waiting but I hate that I can do nothing. Maybe by next week we'll have it and I won't have frustration in me anymore.