The Paperwork Marathon

If you're part of my family and are still wondering what on earth has possessed us, just take a look at this photo. How could you not want a zillion of these?

The paperwork marathon, at least on our part, is almost finished for now. All that's left are our autobiographies (well, David's...mine's been finished for about two months), the acquisition of David's birth certificate, the submission of our I-600A (which is dependent upon the acquisition of David's birth certificate and some info from our agency regarding how to fill out a few sections. Of course, the acquisition of said info from our agency is dependent upon our becoming official clients of our agency, which is dependent upon our submitting our signed, notarized contracts to them, which will occur on Monday), and our medical forms. I swear, sometimes it's hard to figure out what comes first in this process: the chicken or the egg.

We headed over to our marvelous doctor's office (with all four in tow) this afternoon to get those forms filled out, and then we begged our friend (and realtor) Trisha, who also happens to be a notary, to come notarize the medical forms because we simply couldn't handle another 20-mile drive on I-10 to the nearest Chase bank with a notary on staff who's in today (oh, and the bank also closed at 1:00 today, which made it even more challenging to use their on-site notary at 3:45 this afternoon).

I was finally able to see Grace and Jack's "adoption paperwork." It involved fingerprint cards they'd made for themselves (Grace felt it was critical that every member of the family be fingerprinted, but Henry and George said, "No.") as well as an adoption application Grace had created that included, for starters, the members of our family, whether or not we had pets, what kind of pet we have, and whether or not he's well-behaved (interestingly, she noted him as well-behaved). I believe that last night Grace also began the decorating plans for her sister's room. I won't ask what they are because I know they're undoable (recently she asked me to paint the Chinese flag on her ceiling because she was interested in China that week; she couldn't understand what could possibly be so difficult about that request). In addition, I know that she'll change her decorating scheme 586 times before her sister arrives (not to mention the fact that I have a few ideas of my own!).

I'm definitely getting a glimpse of what it will be like to shop with Grace and Jack as their sister's arrival gets closer. With Katie and Steve expecting a baby in September (YEAH!), those two are already in full-force baby-shopping-for-our-cousin mode. In Target the other day, Jack was like, "We need to get Aunt Katie's baby some binkies. It needs a bib. It needs some bottles." Grace was running for the clothing department and wasn't at all pleased that she didn't know if she was looking for pink or blue. I'm not happy about that either. We're hoping for some resolution shortly on that issue. Henry was yelling about being thirsty, and George was begging for an Elmo cup - for himself. At least I had 50% of my people on task.

We hope that our home study will officially commence this week. The official visit may not occur until next week, but that's okay. It's the first week with all four kids home and out of school for the summer, so I'm sure I'll be plenty busy handling the noise (and the heat).