I just RE-sent the final document, via e-mail, for our pre-approval. The agency is having mail server issues again tonight. But the very excellent news is that the monster document should be in the caseworker's inbox when she arrives in the morning. I stayed up way late into the night, worked on it all day and evening, and am so, so glad to be done with that one!
Also sent this evening was the "Rehabilitation and Nurturing" document to China, that indeed was allowed to be only one paragraph and a maximum of 1/2 page long. I can't usually even manage to say, "Bless you" in that little amount of space!
Everything that had to be notarized or otherwise signed, and all of the photos went out via express mail today and are to arrive in Washington by noon tomorrow. Now we wait for word from China as to whether they like us or not. The caseworker tells us that China is quite predictable and has only surprised them one time in all of the years they have worked with them. If you get the pre-approval you can pretty much celebrate.
We had a little setback on Ethan's birth certificate. Something was omitted when it was mailed, so the State Department sent it all back to us. We corrected the error, and sent it express back to them - the OTHER Washington - D.C. The certificate isn't needed until a later step, but it takes a really long time to arrive.
Both of these things were pretty urgent to get into the mail today, and Ethan was a bit late getting home. As we were zoom, zoom, zooming towards the post office we noticed that all the stoplights were out, and none of the businesses seemed to have any lights. A thunderstorm came through earlier and knocked out power to some of the areas. Things didn't look good for getting the copies we needed and doing express mail, and there was no time to find another post office branch. BUT when we arrived at the post office, their building was the first thing on that entire stretch of road (probably 3 miles) that had electricity. We thanked God, and got our mailings done just in time for the employee to lock the doors behind us!
While we are waiting on China we can hopefully be making progress with our homestudy. I haven't heard anything from that agency in several days, so its time to make some phone calls.
Oh, and if you have been trying to comment here and haven't been able to, I believe I found the setting that allows comments now. Sorry about that!
