So what to do in the meantime. Hmm. Well, I just sent in yet another check. This will be the best 80 bucks ever spent! For $40 we can get an update on our little girl. Size, weight, other measurements, physical, mental and motor skills development and in general what she likes to do, how she behaves, etc. It will be pretty interesting to see what a quick visit by an outsider garners. The sample we read was pretty sad. In the box of commentary for speech and language development, this is what it said: Because there is no one-to-one talk in this institution, he is fairly behind in language. It's almost unfathomable to imagine these little babies in cribs all day without ANY adult interaction other than feeding and changing. No one-to-one talk. Think about that. It's deeply disturbing. Even more so when it's our little girl who has to endure it for 6 more months. Oh and for the additional $40 we will get 3 new photos. Yay. Hope to be able to share them with you soon.
You may notice I am calling her little girl now.. it feels a little early to grant her baby sister status, but I promise as soon as we have confirmation we're gonna get her, she will then forever be referred to as baby sister.
On Friday I sent out Parker's birth certificate to a courier in Chicago. I just got it back from the state of Minnesota a few days prior. I had to have it state certified before this last, final step of authentication. We should get it back in about a week and a half.
I also finally started our on-line class. You may recall we were advised a little late in the game that we were a couple of hours short in our pre-adopt training requirements. So I started the on-line class Wednesday night. I wouldn't say I'm learning a whole lot but just more of the same. I already have a good idea of what goes on in the orphanages, how the kids develop (or don't) as a result, and the challenges we face in the early months, and the class pretty much just reaffirms all of this.
We have a few notarizations left to take care of and after that our dossier will be ready to go. Save for the I-800A approval. Regarding that, early last week we received a letter from the Department of Homeland Security that our application and all fees have been received and the next step is that we'll be contacted from a local USCIS office regarding our fingerprint appointment. Hoping we get our appointment very soon. I've read varying thoughts on this. Some say to wait for your appointment because in doing so you will already have an officer assigned to you who will process your application start to finish. I've also heard that rather than wait for your appointment that you can just walk in. This is where it gets controversial. Some say it speeds it up (since you just walk in say tomorrow rather than wait for your scheduled appointment, say, 2 weeks away). Others say if you do that, you still won't get an officer assigned to you until the original fingerprint appointment date. I think we'll just go with the process as it is suggested. We'll need the time to plan ahead as I am assuming Parker will need to leave work and I'll have to get a sitter for the boys.
From the get go, I have been trying to move the process along as swiftly as I could, or as was in my control, but now I have an increased sense of urgency. I'm sure I'm going to go completely insane and back, maybe a few times, in the coming months. It's so strange and unnatural to think we have a little girl who is just sitting there waiting, all the while barely getting her basic needs met.
We have started tossing around names. We had some great names already agreed upon from when we pregnant with our boys. But now that we've seen her little face, it's sort of a game changer. It's not just coming up with a name that we both, or rather, we all like and agree on. It's different because we've seen her and now we are kind of caught up in the "well, she doesn't really look like a ..." We watched a movie last night, as we do pretty much every Saturday, most Fridays too, and as the credits rolled, a name caught my eye. A name I would never have considered but now we're toying with it. I should also mention our big kid has pretty much vetoed all previous name considerations. He even came up with a super cute name on his own when we threw it back at him. So I guess we have at least a couple of names we're tossing around. A lot of people have asked us if we're keeping her Chinese name, and the answer is no, we don't plan to. If her name had some significance to it, we would, of course. But she was abandoned and left in a field and the orphanage just gave her a name. I think she deserves a fresh, new start.
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