Girl toy alert

Pottery barn kids sale + free shipping + cute little Asian doll = I just bought our little girl her first toy!  Yes, the plan was to hold off on any purchases until we had a referral but I couldn't hold back...and there is good reason...we officially submitted our dossier to our agency today.  Our precious packet of paperwork that we spent months preparing made it to D.C. and back without a hitch. Thank you God.  We should know our waiting list number in a few days :)  Celebrating the small steps here...

Movin' Along

In case you were wondering.....we have checked off some additional adoption requirements.  Today we road tripped it to our state capital for dossier authentication.  Remember that word "dossier" (pronounced doss-ee-ay)? Refresh: It's that packet of paperwork including letters of reference, homestudy, letter of intent, lots of legal mumbo jumbo that is sent to Thailand for the officials to review and decide whether we can adopt a child from their country.  The secretary of state's office has to authenticate the notaries in the dossier in order to sent it to Washington D.C. for another round of authentication......whew!.......wears me out just thinking about it. So back to the road trip.....Husband, #2 and I enjoyed our state capital visit while #1 was in school.  #2 must have hummed the whole way home....that kid is a little songbird.  Another big step-Adoption training.  Last weekend, we spent 12 hours inside a conference room with other adoptive couples learning about how to parent an internationally adopted child.  Overall, the training was very worthwhile.  Our trainer knew her business......and there were other couples in attendance who had already adopted internationally-a perk we did not expect.  The training was a mixture of lecture/discussion, videos and exercises.   The exercises were mostly geared toward understanding an adoptee's life perspective...powerful stuff.  Next step: sending the dossier to Thailand and becoming an official member of our agency's waiting list. Stay tuned!