3 BIG days...an officer, a dossier...and a ton of details

So you deserve a medal if you stick with me through this one. It's been nuts here. Nuts, I say. And it's been a good nuts, in hindsight. Still, that means I'm a bad blogger and journal keeper. But maybe it means that I'm a fantastic paper chasing mama!

I have mentioned a couple times about exciting things happening with our adoption process and didn't want to share things too quickly. You know, just in case. I'm not superstitious. Although I did have a pair of lucky basketball game day underwear all through my senior year of high school. lol. Seriously though, with the adoption, I really just figured that if things didn't work out, it would have it made it that much harder to stomach had I blogged about it.

Now I know, that's not real life, is it? But it's my attempt at protecting myself. Sounds really crummy and kind of selfish. Doesn't it? I just didn't want to deal with the disappointment and letdown if we weren't successful.

The long and short of it is this. We needed to speed things up...both for our little prince's heart and for our paperwork that was set to expire in mid April {unless we sent it in batches, which we didn't want to do but would have had it been completely necessary.} Immigration approval comes in two stages. The first stage, lasts anywhere from 35-80 days. It ebbs and flows. We really needed it to be quicker.

So we asked one of our state senators for help with a medical expedite for the little prince. We contacted his office back in January and in February, they called us at home to say "YES! We will most certainly help you." But there was a catch, kind of. Our senator has no control over the powers that be federally. They can request that our immigration approval be sped up considerably because our baby boy has some heart conditions. There is just no guarantee that they will comply or that they will even be convinced that they should.

We were encouraged though and our I-800A paperwork {that gives us permission to legally immigrate an orphaned child to the US} was overnighted on Valentine's Day.

Suweet.

It was signed for and received the following day, the 15th. This is called "Receipt Date".

Brilliant terminology. Whoever thought of that was a genius. :)

I contacted our senator's office again to let him know that we had submitted our paperwork and he let me know that once we had confirmation that it was at H@gue, he would contact them for us. And that he did. And he promptly {within a day} got an email from them stating that we had been approved for a medical expedite of our I-800 immigration process.

Woo to the hoo.

The I-800 process is kind of ridiculous. There's a mysterious "Lock Box" which is really no box at all but is somewhere out in TX where your paperwork is sent initially and your whopping $890 payment is processed. And then there is the building where the people actually work and review your home study and give you the much anticipated approval. Those folks are out in MO. The kicker is, it takes about a couple of weeks after your "Receipt Date" for the all important fingerprinting notice to grace your mailbox. Without this notice, you can do nothing.

On Friday, the 2nd, I had a newborn shoot {TWINS!} in the big city and decided to give the USC*S peoples a little call and see where we stood. I was hoping to have an officer assigned to us. After some back and forth phone calls getting the senator's office to email them a document and yada yada...our officer called my cell phone.

She was kind. Matter of fact. But kind enough. She had our paperwork. She had the verification that we had been approved for the medical expedite.

Then, she said something that made my heart sink.

She told me that something didn't seem right. That our file stated that we had a son who died in China last fall. I confirmed that to her. And she wanted to know why we hadn't filed the I-800A before now. And I told her that we didn't get that far. That our home study was completed at the time but not finalized. That when our Seth died, everything stopped.

Everything just stopped.

And then,

"Well, he wasn't your son then. He was just a little boy you were hoping to adopt."

Silence.

Hold it together, Kam.

Don't cry, Kam.

"Yes, ma'am. I understand. It's just that. He was our son. We had a referral. We had Pre Approval for him."

More silence.

"It's just that. We loved him."

And then she said that our file was very misleading. And that Chin@ shouldn't give families approval without the immigration paperwork being finished first.

I was so surprised that she didn't seem to grasp the process. Or maybe, we were just misunderstanding each other. To be fair, at no point was she angry or haughty. Just very matter of fact. Very business like. And since then, I've read other posts about this particular officer and they all say she is "by the book." I see that about her.

One of us, I don't remember who honestly, changed the subject. She told me that our fingerprinting appointment was for March 26th. I asked if we could walk in early to the Homel@nd Security field office in the big city. She said that we could do whatever we wanted. But that there was no way they were going to let us in to be fingerprinted until our appointment date. She did say, however, that if by some chance we tried, and got in...to call her and she would analyze our home study and see if she could approve us more quickly. That was the bright spot of the entire conversation. Still, I was so worried that she may find something that needed fixing in our home study. I love our social worker...she does a fabulous job. The first I-800 home study that she wrote for us back in 2008 made it through perfectly without any requests for more evidence or changes with USC*S. And WACAP is just fantastic. I know they know what they are doing. But I just worried that this could be hard and that maybe, our home study may be missing something and we would get held up.

I was so bummed. I called Jase. I called my mom. By this time, I was 45 minutes south of the big city getting our home study's notary verified. Two hours away from home and getting crummy news. So I needed some back up. I needed to vent.

I decided to post on the rumor queen forum about it via my phone and within minutes, had other adoptive mamas commenting that we could walk in the field office. That they had done it recently and it was fine. This was Friday....

On Saturday, our fingerprinting notice came. It indeed said the date to appear was the 26th. But on Tuesday, we finished up our home schooling for the day and took ourselves a trip to that office. And you know what? They let us in! It took 45 minutes start to finish. Whew. Was I ever relieved. I don't know why I was so nervous. I even made an insane amount of cookie dough at 9pm the night before and just had myself a nervous party. :)

I called our officer after our successful printing but got no answer. When, another morning went by and I didn't hear back, I emailed her Wednesday from school. She got back to me very quickly and said that she would be reviewing our home study that afternoon and would be in touch if changes were necessary. Yikes.

Right before church started, I check my phone one more time for an email and what do you know!?! We were approved. 28 hours after fingerprinting and just 21 days after submitting our paperwork!

Amazing.

Wednesday was a pretty great day.

She said "Congratulations!" to us and not only that, she emailed a pdf of our approval notice so we could have it notarized and authenticated immediately. This just does not happen very often and I probably shouldn't even blog about it. Except, it's what God did for us and for several other families whose children have sick hearts. As of this writing, March 10th, the hard copy of the approval will at the earliest, arrive Monday the 12th...5 days after approval has been granted.

That may seem like nothing and in the grand scheme of things, it's not. But to babies who are waiting and mamas who are hurting, it's a whole lot. It just is.

Check out this screen shot from the rumor queen forum...this is a chart of participating families who are waiting for immigration approval...notice the dates at the top. Our final one says that we were 24 days...but it was only 21. A nice guy named Mike puts this together each week. :)

So you can imagine, I hit the ground running on Thursday. We had four docs {including the I-800A approval} that needed to be taken through the various steps of verification and authentication. That meant that I visited several people and places that day to make it happen. Syd, Joel and I rode into the big city that afternoon and finished the last of it.

All of that work, now tidied up...complete with state seals and blue backing. Our entire adoption is at this point, reduced to a stack of neatly processed paperwork. That afternoon, I set to work making copies of everything and getting it all ready for the courier. Our dossier must go to Washington DC to the Embassy of the People's Republic of Chin@ for final authentication and then on to Seattle where WACAP will put it on it's final leg of the journey.

Something HUGE happened Thursday evening, and it deserves a blog post all to itself. So I will save that tidbit ginormous piece of info for another day.

On Friday, I notarized some adoption paperwork for some dear friends {need to post about them too!} and then I headed to the bank to pick up three separate money orders to place inside the giant envelope that held our dossier. Then, I drove across the street to Brown and put it all on the counter. And I took one last picture of it all with my phone. :)

Exhale.

My goodness, was that ever hard. I nearly cried.

Our Thailand dossier was a piece of cake really. We didn't have to do any of the authentications for it. We basically just gathered the documents and sent them on to WACAP. It was authenticated by the Washington Secretary of State...not by our own state's. But this China dossier, this has been a labor of love.

Our love. My love for two little boys.

And today, March 10th, as I tracked our dossier on my phone to see where it was sitting, I missed Seth.

Four months ago today, our beautiful boy went to Jesus. And this morning, the packet of paperwork that was meant for him but destined for another, went to DC. Tears have come quickly for me today. I've tried to stay busy and be grateful. Mountains have crumbled at our feet this week, friends. Big, huge mountains. And it sounds silly, but it still feels like we are walking on the rubble of those mountains toward our little prince. It's seemingly unstable. It hurts my feet and I'm emotionally tired. But I know that I know that I know, that Seth is fine. Somedays, I'm just not. I still just physically hurt for my boy. How I want to touch him. It is more than enough though, to know that Seth is perfect.

And in his place, waits a little prince. One that I absolutely cannot wait to hold and kiss and love. I just cannot wait. I'm so relieved that our dossier is out of my hands. I told my mom, it seemed though, that it was the last part of Seth. Half of those documents were for him...with him in mind and in heart. And now they are gone. We made the decision to have the courier send it directly back to WACAP instead of to us. I didn't want to see them again {or pay twice for them to get where they are going}. I just wanted them to go. And at the same time, I wanted to hold onto them because on some dumb level, it still felt like we were paper chasing for Seth with those documents.

I need to go. The weight of this is getting to me and I don't want to take away from all that the Lord has done this week. I really don't. It's been miraculous. And I can't wait to tell you more very soon.