Gentle Years

Spring is the season of change.  For us that means that Little Baby comes home from college.  If you've never had a child in college, let me explain that they have two of everything-one for their life on campus and one for their life at home-which means that when they're home, you have all sorts of stuff to store with no room to store it in.  Here is what the television room looked like on her first day back (just feet from her bedroom door, of course):

The birds are also back, which I love, though not always at 4:00 in the morning when their song wakes me up. But I saw a hummingbird Sunday and several times a day we see a robin who comes swooping down below the porch roof.  It turns out he/she has been building a nest behind one of our porch chairs, of all places:

Every day last week Aidan anxiously said, have they called yet?  I wish they would call! because he couldn't WAIT to get his glasses once he decided that he wanted glasses (which took all of about five minutes after entering the eye doctor's office and seeing the glasses on display).  So we got his call last night and here he is sporting his new lenses:

And, on the adoption front, we finally got a letter that I think (hope?) will pass muster.  I scanned it in and sent it off yesterday to our agency.  Thank you, Myra, for your help in drafting this!

Almost two weeks ago my doctor and Aidan's Tiger Scout leader were involved in a head-on collision, each driving the opposite car.  Our Scout leader has a badly broken foot and the other foot is sprained; of the four sons in the vehicle at the time, only one has a major injury-fractured jaw-but not major enough that he lost teeth.  Our doctor's thigh bone is broken and he will not be returning to his practice until the end of June.  This accident coincided almost perfectly with a request from the Chinese government for a follow-up letter to our medical forms.  Our doctor's partner is on vacation until May 9 so our request was sent to the other office of the practice.  Today I got that letter from a doctor there that I do not know.  It actually improves my profile and makes my husband's profile unacceptable for Chinese adoption.  Our doctor had been very specific on the medical form in his choice of language, making sure that he was completely truthful and that our file would be acceptable.  Our agency got our medical forms reviewed last August and were assured that they would be fine.  Our doctor offered to write a letter where he could further explain-the form is limited in space but not limited in time (it doesn't ask if you've had anything in the last two years, it asks if you have ever had any of the following).  We told him no, we were all set.  We're not.  I'm tired.

Our agency told us that we could have a LID for weeks before being notified of it.  Since another family in our group got theirs the first week in March and their LID was March 1, I contacted the agency just in case they had got ours and not notified us.  They had and had not.  So our LID is March 18!    Don't know why it's 2-1/2 weeks after theirs-they were all hand carried to China-but we'll take it :-)

Eva's best friend was adopted last month and is now living in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.  That girl's mother sent a bunch of pictures to me this week of the girls and other kids at the orphanage.  I was going to post them with our LID, but still don't have it, so I thought I'd go ahead and share a couple of them now. Thanks, Jolene! (PS-Eva is the one in red)

I have to admit I was getting a little bit nervous about our dossier.  It was hand carried to China by our agency in late February but we do not have a LID yet and we had also not received a bill.  G takes medication that is normally prescribed for depression but he takes it to control vertigo and even though our agency had the medical pre-approved last August, you never know, right?  So I was very excited (yeah, in a sick sort of way) when I opened my email tonight and had an invoice from my agency!

I’m sending this message out to our families who have recently submitted their dossiers to China.  Your dossiers were hand-delivered to CCAA by our staff while they were in China!!  Congratulations on being through the dossier step of your adoption journey.  We will have your Log In Date for you soon.

I've been playing with the photos at the top of my pages, but when I try to stretch them out, they stretch down as well as to the side, and I can't find a way to title them-could just be limitations of my service provider.  Anyway, the photo on my front page is the ski area on our road, so the view is actually looking down at our house-we're about two to three miles from the base.  The picture on the top of this page is the lake in the town where our middle and high schools are located, and where our son lives.  We swim there as well as at other places in the summer.  This lake is cold but the beaches are great and it's one of the ten cleanest lakes in the world.  When I was young it was the fourth cleanest, but it goes up and down in the top ten now.

FedEx came today!  Very exciting, but you know how it is, it also makes you a wreck.  Deep breaths help to concentrate so I don't screw anything up!  He was bringing our dossier all authenticated, etc., from the State Dept. and Chinese Embassy in DC.  Tomorrow night we'll get our visa photos.  We tried to this weekend but had one of "those" customer service people-first she asked if she could help me, then when I told her what we needed, she told me she had to turn the machines on and wouldn't be ready for us for an hour, so I said we'd shop, and when we came back, she told us it hadn't been an hour and she was too busy to take care of us then even though no one else was in line (it had only been 56 minutes-shame on me for not checking the time).  So we'll either get them done at a "real" photo shop where we can get in and out in a few minutes or we'll get them at a different Wal-Mart when I pick up the photo collage to go with the dossier.

This afternoon I got the I-800A approval in the mail and hopefully by Friday we will have our documents sealed by the NH Secretary of State's office!  It has been a long, long process to get to this point.