On Your Mark...Get Set...Go!!!

And we are off on our paper-chase. We are working on our 200 questions for our autobiography. Wow is all I can say. On top of sharing our life story and then some, we have two pages worth of items we need to get. To name a few:

• medical checkup
• vet checkup for our animals
• passport...more on that later
• proof of medical insurance
• signed reports
• police clearance

Well, okay that is pretty much it for right now but that's enough! As far as the passport is concerned, oh my gosh, what a fiasco. So today we get our first official piece of mail from our agency (see above picture. You know how some women take a picture of their pregnancy test stick with the plus sign...this is ours) Anyway, it is a letter with our list of to do items. As I was reading it, it basically stated we couldn't start our home-study, the reviews with the social worker, without all of the above. I was thinking most of that we can do in a week or two, but the passports we wouldn't get back until 8 weeks later! We were so freaked out because we don't want to be two months behind! I can't wait that long! We HAD to get them out today. So at 3:30 we were going crazy trying to figure out the birth years of my parents. Of course Mom & Dad are camping, so I can't ask them. Liz is in Africa, so I can't ask her. Who else would know? We were trying to do internet searches....no luck. We tried doing a people search...no luck (you should feel safe Mom). Finally we looked up my Uncle Rusty on the internet and called him at work. "Uncle Rusty," I said "I am soooooooooooo desperate! I need Dad's birth year! And do you happen to know Mom's?" He didn't know that one. So then we decided to figure out the year by my birth certificate and bolted out to Walgreens to take our photos and then off to the post office. In the mean time, I didn't trust the date I came up with for Mom, so John called Kevin to see if he knew by any odd chance. Nope...but he was calling Liz in Africa and call us right back. By then it was 4:30 and the post office closed in 30 minutes. Kevin called back and said he couldn't reach Liz. I sweating like a bullet. I made the decision that we would send it off like it was and chance it. Well, we got to the Post Office with 10 minutes to spare and when we finally made it up to desk the man said, "Sorry, we don't do those here." ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!

So here is why this was so critical that we did it today. I am going to be up teaching at A&M all next week. So that means I can't do any paper-chasing. We would be losing another week. In total desperation, I got home and wrote an email to our adoption specialist....help me! She said that we can start our home study before we get our passports in. All that stressing out for nothing. I can see why this is called the paper-chase phase. Blah!!!

So for the next week, John will be making appointments
and working on his autobiography and I will be working on my autobiography in my hotel at fire school. What a summer this has been!