We have our USCIS fingerprint appointment on Thursday. Can't wait. Especially since we get to take our little guy with us. That should make for a fun experience for all. He's actually a really great and well behaved kid, but he talks a lot. Hmm, he may get that from yours truly. And he's LOUD! He will say stuff loudly like "hey daddy, I saw a guy with a big, huge belly!" when said fat guy is about 6 inches away. Or in a dressing room at Nordstrom "Mommy, why aren't you wearing underwear?" I do wear underwear, people, but he's a 3 1/2 year old comedian and finds this line of questioning hilarious and it only gets worse, and louder, every time I take him shopping with me. You'd think I'd learn! At the end of our Target trip today, we settled into a table in the snack area.. I handed him his milk and a slice of lemon loaf and he screamed at the top of his lungs "OH YEAH, I'M GONNA PIIIIIGGGG OUT!" So needless to say who knows what may come out of his mouth when he's stuck at a customs and immigration office with us and a million others. I'll just start apologizing now. I am not sure what to expect for final approval. Some say it's a week to a week and a half after the fingerprint appointment, but then a couple of people on the group that I'm being tracked with said they got theirs within hours of their fingerprints, so who knows. I'm preparing for the latter, just in case. We want that DTC ASAP! As soon as we get the approval, we'll send it along with everything else for our D (dossier) to our agency. Our coordinator will then have everything authenticated at the Chinese embassy in the city (aka San Francisco for the non-locals).
While we were on vacation, we got Parker's birth certificate back. A reminder on that... he was born in Minnesota. The Chinese embassy in Chicago has jurisdiction over the state of Minnesota so his birth certificate had to go there, instead of SF like all of our other docs, for authentication. We used a courier service to get that taken care of. Very efficient and cost effective.
Nothing has really changed on our timeline. We're still hopeful we can be DTC early to mid-May, making late September travel pretty likely. We just may get to celebrate baby sister's birthday as a family on September 23! And if not, then shortly thereafter. I'm not getting my hopes up as we'll be so close at that point, that there will be no reason to be at all disappointed. Whatever, I'm all talk. I'll bet totally pissed if somebody, somewhere doesn't do all they can to get this little girl to her family by her second freaking birthday... But, with my positive face back on, I have to keep focused that we'll have many more birthdays to make up for the two we didn't get to share together, if in fact some dipshit loser drops the ball.
Now to the fun stuff. We exhausted any and all possible names. Parker was set on a few names we had picked out when we were pregnant with the boys. We had some really cute names that I love, but not for the sweet little face we have already seen. I must say, it's a whole lot easier to name a baby before you've seen it! The names we had just didn't fit baby sister. Not only did they not fit, but they also got vetoed by our big kid. He didn't like any of them. He called them weird or crazy or just simply said he didn't like them. He came up with a really cute name when we threw it back at him.. okay so you don't like any of our names, what do YOU think we should name her? His answer was Riley. We were shocked! He came up with a good one on the fly. We thought about it but when I googled it, I discovered it is really popular and if there's one thing we don't want in a name, it's popularity. Try being a Jennifer born in 1973. It was the most popular name from 1970-1984 and ranks as the #4 name overall from 1911-2010. Jennifer was to the 70s what Emily is to the 00s. I pray for all of those Emilys that "Emster" isn't the nickname of choice in college. I just about puked one day when I was walking home from class and a girl drove by in a cabriolet bearing the license plate "Jenster." Barfity, barf, barf, barf. So, no super popular names. Riley was a no, as were Kyle and Ryan. Kyle is super cute and still ranks in my faves but our little girl needs a girly name! Ryan is adorable. I worked with a girl named Ryan at a paper mill when I was in college. Yup. But it's a little to Irishy for our Asiany kid. And our dear friends may name their little girl Ryan and they get first dibs anyway since it's a family name. We stewed over Casey for a few days but I kind of felt it wasn't girly enough either. I fell in love with Colette until I found it's cursed with popularity as well. My dear cousin came up with a great list of C names, my favorite of which was Cali, but Parker poo pood all of them. I will take a quick sec to mention that our boys both have C names, as do all of my girl cousins on my mom's side. My uncle's girls are Cheryl, Chana, Charlotte and my aunt's girls are Christal and Cadie. My uncle's kids had the C names long before my aunt's did (they're about 14ish years apart so their kids aren't close in age) and she didn't pick the names because of her brother ... much like we didn't pick the names we did because of family ... BUT, we almost got wrapped up in keeping up with the Cs, but decided not to at the expense of naming our daughter something we didn't really love. We were getting nowhere so I started coming up with all sorts of names we'd never yet considered, and which didn't start with C, and texting them to Parker. I'm sure it totally annoyed him to get pings from me all day with nothing but lists of names. But it worked! I wore him down. We talked about the names the night of the heavy texting afternoon, and by mid-day the following day, the decision was made. It was helped along by my friend telling me that mei mei is little sister in Chinese. I triple checked with Parker before I made my run to Michael's for craft supplies. I love me a crafty project, you know! Little guy's preschool teacher had been asking to see a picture of baby sister because he talks about her all of the time so I thought what better way than to let the boys make picture frames for their pictures of baby sister. So, without further adieu, I'm happy to announce a beautiful name for our beautiful little girl. Her middle name is after Parker's hometown in Minnesota. Macey Aurora Colvin
Love it!!!!
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