Yay, yay for PA!

This just goes to show, you never really know when the process is going to surprise you. I spent the morning much like any other Monday morning. Dropped off the little guy, then the big guy. Hit the gym.  Ran some errands.  Picked up the little guy, had lunch and a promised trip to Starbucks.  We then hit a cute little shop in the creek for a much needed booster seat for the big kid. He may very well be the almost 6 year old still riding in a car seat.  Like, full-on, 5 point harness car seat.  I know, I know, but he's alive.  So there!  Why not stay as safe as possible for as long as possible.  But I caved after too many "Mom, my seatbelt's stuck."  "Mom, pull over, I can't get my straps on."  This morning was the straw that broke the camel's back.  On M/W/F mornings, I put our little guy in the big kid's seat because we do a drop off and he has to be on the side closest to the school.  The seatbelt in my piece of doo doo car ALWAYS, read ALWAYS! gets stuck.  So I opened the door to let him in and told him to wait for me to put the seatbelt on. Of course he didn't wait.  As I'm putting my stuff in the trunk I hear "Mommy, I need help, the seatbelt is stuck."  Long story short, I had to take the car seat OUT of the car in order to free the seatbelt. I'm done.  I'm over it and the car seat is lucky it's not floating down the creek right now!  After that I had had it and thought that's it, today is the day.  So with little guy in tow, we picked up one of the only booster seats available with the latch system.  Yep, two thumbs up for safety!  Mission complete, so we headed back to pick up the big kid. He does a super fun "critters and clay" class after school on Mondays. I haven't yet seen the fruits of his efforts but he's told us that so far he's made a moose, a turtle and a rhino. I can't wait to see them, especially since they're these mysterious creatures he creates in a class that I've yet to see anything come out of.  After we got home, I made the boys busy themselves with getting the mail and taking some of the packaging to the trash while I removed the car seat from the car.  Two seconds of installation later, and the new booster seat is in and ready to ride.  Take that seatbelt!

After we came inside, I sorted the mail and saw two letters from homeland security.  One for me and one for Parker.  Nervously I opened them.  I was hoping they were for fingerprint appointments but they could have been RFEs, which are requests for evidence (read:  delay).  Whew, fingerprint appointments.  Thankfully, we got the same appointment time on April 12th.  It's fine but I would have much preferred earlier, of course.  I sent Parker an email right away telling him to clear his calendar for that day because we cannot miss this appointment. If there's one thing he's not good at, it's getting out of work on-time for anything but .. more work! .. so I had to be stern.

Two seconds later, an email came in from our coordinator. The subject line was in Chinese, so it could have been anything.  But the body of it contained these magical words:  "Dear Jennifer:  I received your PA today.  Congratulations."  WHAT!! Yay, so we can (we are now pre-approved) adopt her and with that, here she is: