Home Study Complete!!

So, its been a few days since our last post. I just wanted to give everyone an update on our progress. It has been quite the hectic 2 weeks as it is the time of year for Haiden to have his blood drawn and see all of his specialist. So Melissa has been running around from Fairfax to Fredericksburg getting Haiden to his appointments. We will see today if Haiden needs to get tubes back into his ears. Our gut feeling is yes, so that is yet another set of appointments.

Anyway, so our home study is complete. It actually has been completed since last week, but we finally got the originals 2 days ago. So, today we will be sending out our I-600A and start that process. Thank goodness that we don't have to wait for that to get back before we move on. It seems to be a lengthy process, but we won't need it until we go back for the final trip. In the meantime, we are working with St. Lucia to get our multiple copies of our marriage license and having them apostilled. That has been painful because they haven't been able to find the "book" with our marriage number / marriage officer in it. So instead of waiting for their Civil Status Registrar Agency to figure this out, Melissa called Sandals (where we got married) and got the information we needed from them. So now I am working both ends and hopefully they will meet int the middle. I told them that I need it in my hands by next Wednesday.

Melissa also picked up our Psych Eval yesterday. I think out of everything, that was the most painful process. Not because of the actual questions (although there were some strange questions to answer), but because the doctor's office was the most clueless and unprofessional place that I have seen so far. Not because people were being rude to us, but because we explained to them how everything has to look (i.e. the notary portion) several times to include emails with examples. It took them over a week to get their own notary just to sign it. They couldn't return calls or emails. Once it was all said and done, she picked it up yesterday and they did all wrong. So, because we have learned to be extremely resourceful since this process began, Melissa immediately called Susan from Hand in Hand and she provided some advice. Luckily our close friend works somewhat (sort of) in the near proximity (30 minutes) from the doctors office. So Melissa went there to get her to notarize it. It was such a pain. Melissa may even do a separate blog entry on that situation by itself. I am sure I am missing plenty and probably even got some fact wrong.

I plan to hand deliver our registration packet to the Apostille office in Richmond next Thursday for walk-in service and then have it mailed to Hand in Hand on Friday. Fingers crossed, we could potentially have a response from the Russian government by the middle of February....with hopefully a flight date that is shortly after that..... (we all have to have goals!!)

So today, we are tightening up our registration packet. Attaching our pictures and doing any last minute adjustments / fixes and then our close friend will be ready to notarize everything this weekend and we are good to go.

I am going for now because Melissa took Haiden to the ENT and Noah and I are hanging out. I need to do a few things before she gets back and I head to work......Charlie