Some bad news

We got a little bit of bad news today, which is discouraging after the good news yesterday. Apparently, there is a problem with Greg's employment letter, and we have to have it redone. We got the letter, notarized it, and county certified it today. Tomorrow, we will apostille it, and send it on to Europe. We are trying to figure out the fastest way to get it to Europe, and we are hoping that this will not slow our process down much at all. Please pray that we can get it there very, very quickly, and that our team in country will be able to continue translating the rest of the documents so that our dossier will be ready to submit as soon as this one piece arrives.

Great News!

This will be very short tonight, because we are very tired and busy as always, but we have a little bit of news we want to share. Our dossier is in Eastern Europe! This is a whole day ahead of schedule, and we are very excited. Please join us in praying that it will be translated quickly and submitted soon. It should be submitted some time next week, probably on Thursday. We are asking God to shave a few more days off of the process by allowing it to be submitted a little earlier in the week, and we are thanking and praising him for how quickly everything has happened so far.

Celebrating and Waiting

Well, as you might have guessed from the title of this post, we did indeed get our dossier sent off to Eastern Europe, but it has been a more challenging and tiring experience than we were hoping for. Greg last posted on Sunday, so I will back up to the weekend and start there.

Saturday was a great day. My parents kept the kids so that Greg and I could have an all-day date, and it was wonderful. We bought a car seat for Mikaela and a stroller for Josiah to use while we are in Europe. We had been reading car seat reviews for weeks by that point and feel confident that we have chosen a seat that will be safe and comfortable for her from the very beginning and for years to come.

Sunday was another great day. My brother had been in California for the last three months, and he came home on Saturday evening. We spent most of the day Sunday at my parents' house just enjoying his company and catching up with him. He and Josiah are great friends, and once Josiah had a few minutes to adjust to Allan being home again, he had a blast with his uncle.

On Monday we hit the ground running hard. As Greg mentioned, we found mistakes in quite a few of our forms, and Monday was the day we finally resolved most of that. A friend of ours is a doctor, and he agreed to re-do our medical forms. We posted previously that there was a mistake in Greg's form, but most of you don't know that we also found a mistake in my form quite a bit later. This doctor graciously agreed to redo our forms, and then redo them again... and again. We finally got them right on the fifth attempt for Greg's and the third attempt for mine. Thank goodness for our friend's patience! Another friend of ours is a notary, and she had agreed to coordinate with this doctor to get the forms notarized without even asking us to be in the middle at all. On Monday she finally had the correct forms from this doctor and notarized them for us. On Monday morning I met this notary at the Clermont county clerk of courts to get our documents county certified. This is a strange extra step that is required in Ohio. First, documents must be notarized, then the documents must be taken to the clerk of courts in the county where the notary is registered, and an additional form must be attached that certifies the notary really is registered in the county. Then the document must be taken to the state capital where another form, called an apostille, is attached certifying that the county clerk of courts really did certify the notary. The clerk of courts for this county was an hour's drive away, but I got the forms with no problem. I then returned to my end of town and spent the afternoon checking and organizing forms and emailing our home study agency trying to get three more forms that we needed from them. That evening, we celebrated my sister Meghan's birthday. That was a lot of fun, but we were up a bit later than we should have been that night.

Tuesday morning we got up, dropped Josiah off at my parents' house, and took Gabriela up with us to Columbus. We took a slightly longer route to Columbus, because we had to stop by Madison County to certify two more of our documents. Once we got to Columbus, we parked in a parking garage and walked to a bank to get out the cash we needed for our apostilles. We then promptly got lost. Columbus is a beautiful, clearly-laid-out city, and I am not quite sure how we managed to get lost, but we did. We spent almost an hour and a half wandering around the city before we finally arrived at our home study agency to pick up our forms. We had expected the forms would be ready for us, but they were not. It turns out that they hadn't understood exactly what we needed. A few quick phone calls later, we were able to explain exactly what we needed from them. They drafted, printed, signed, and notarized the forms, and we were on our way. By this point, it was almost three thirty, and Gabriela was crying for her afternoon feeding. We decided that I would stop by the library and feed her (they had lovely benches outside) while Greg took our documents to the Secretary of State's office. We knew that was where we needed to get the apostilles, and we were hoping that they would also be able to give us the county certifications for Franklin county there. Greg stopped by the park bench with me to go through the forms one more time to make sure he understood exactly what to do with each form, and then he set off. About 20 minutes later, I followed him with a much happier Gabriela. Just about the time I arrived at the Secretary of State's office, I ran into Greg leaving. Everyone at the office had been very helpful, but they had told him that he needed to get the county certifications at a different building .8 of a mile away. We had almost an hour before the Secretary of State's office closed, so we should still have plenty of time. Only three documents needed that certification, so they were going to work on apostilles for the rest of them while he ran to get those certified. I went in to the Secretary of State's to wait for him to return. It took him about 15 minutes to walk to the other building, so he still thought he could make it back on time. He was directed to an office with a very long line, and began to wait and pray. After 20 minutes, he finally made it to the front of the line, only to be told that he was in the wrong office. Once he finally found the right office, he got the certifications quickly, but was almost out of time. By running a good bit of the way back, he made it to the office four minutes before five, and we did get all of our documents apostilled. We drove home exhausted but happy. We stopped at my parent's house to pick Josiah up and went back to our apartment. Once we put Josiah to bed, we checked all the forms again, preparing to pack them up so we could mail them on our way to work the next morning. As we were sorting through them, we found mistakes in two of the forms from the home study agency. We couldn't believe it! How had we missed them before? The only thing we could imagine is that we were so distracted by Gabriela and how much she needed to eat that we weren't paying enough attention to catch the mistakes. The only way to fix them was to drive the two hours to Columbus again.

My parents agreed to keep the kids for us again the next day, so we dropped them off early in the morning and drove back to Columbus. We had been crushed the night before, but by Wednesday morning, we were doing much better. God had reminded us that He does have a reason for everything, even if He doesn't choose to show us what that reason is. His mercies truly are new every morning, and we had resolved to enjoy the time together and continue working to bring our daughter home. Things went much better Wednesday than they had gone on Tuesday. We didn't get lost. Our agency had everything ready for us when we arrived. We didn't have to run anywhere. All in all, it was a good day. By lunch time, we were done in Columbus and heading back to the Cincinnati area. We checked and rechecked the documents and this time, everything looked fine. So, yesterday afternoon we sent our dossier off. We had planned to go out to a restaurant for a celebration, but we were too tired. We got carry-out and watched an old episode of Diagnosis: Murder. It was exactly what we needed, and we went to bed at 8:30.

Today, Mikaela is 8 months old, and tomorrow it will be three months since we began her adoption. God has been very gracious. We are thanking Him and still praying earnestly that He will continue to protect our daughter and provide all of the funds we need to bring her home.

Almost There . . .

*Sigh* Okay. We are almost done with the biggest chunk of paperwork in this process. Believe it or not, we encountered several more setbacks with our dossier in the past week-and-a-half. Our hope was to have our dossier complete and waiting so that as soon as we received our 171H, we could have apostilles affixed to our documents and put it all in the mail immediately. Well, our dossier came this past Wednesday—an enormous answer to prayer in and of itself—and we are praying that we'll be able to mail our dossier on Tuesday. A full half-dozen of the documents we thought were ready for apostilles have had to be re-done, and we are going to track down the last of these tomorrow, Lord willing. It has been a surreal roller coaster ride lately, but God has shown Himself, yet again, to be faithful and sovereign over all of this. Every time that something gets held up for one reason or another, I have to remind myself that the Lord is directing this entire process and that I need to trust Him to work out the timing in a way that will be best for everyone. It seems to us, at first glance, that the very best way for this to play out would be for Mikaela to come home to us as soon as possible, but that does not seem to be God's will for this. If things continue to move at this pace, she will still come home comparatively quickly, and I am in no way trying to overlook that fact. We know a number of families who have labored for years to bring their child home, and we are grateful that God appears to have spared us and Mikaela from such a long, drawn-out process. The setbacks that we've had, though, have meant that she won't be coming home as quickly as she could have. Looking at everyone involved, I can see now that waiting a few more weeks to get Mikaela will probably be better for our bio kids, as they're now that much older and better able to handle all of the things that will be thrown at them in the coming weeks. In some ways, the hardest part of this entire process has been learning to open my heart to God's will, and leaving it so, something that is especially hard knowing that our little girl is waiting for us nearly half-way around the world. Hopefully by the end of the day on Tuesday, we'll be much closer to having her here with us, where she belongs.

Our Apologies

We need to apologize to everyone who has commented on our blog posts thus far. Only recently did we realize that people could make comments on our posts, so we weren't watching out for those at first. Please forgive us; we're neophytes when it comes to the world of blogs! Our goal is to respond to your comments this afternoon, so keep an eye out for those, and thanks for following our story and praying along with us for Mikaela's speedy homecoming.

Learning to Be Thankful

Everyone who read Kristie's post from last week knows what a hard time we had two Mondays ago as we attempted to apply for passports for our bio kids and to get our medical forms notarized at the doctors' office. If you have not yet read about this, you really should, partially because I am not going to revisit those events in detail, and partially because it is an excellent blow-by-blow account of how that day unfolded. I don't think that I have ever been through a day quite like that before, and even though it was extremely trying, I'm grateful that we went through it all. And that's not something that I would have said that Monday evening. Allow me to explain.

As the number of roadblocks continued to pile up, I became increasingly frustrated with the way that the day was going. It seemed that at every turn we were being prevented from accomplishing what we had set out to do, and I was getting angry. By the end of the day, I had became rather irritable and a bit withdrawn, convinced that my frustration was justifiable. Looking back over everything that happened, however, I don't think that it was. Monday wasn't the first time in the past few weeks that we have encountered opposition in our efforts to bring Mikaela home as soon as possible. The obstacles might have been more intense and more numerous on that particular day—though perhaps they seemed to be more intense because of how many things happened within those eight hours—but we had already been through several roadblocks by the time Monday morning dawned. In fact, we had to overcome a few more obstacles later in the week, and that got me thinking about how I was handling myself. As far as we can tell, the opposition that we have felt since we began Mikaela's adoption six weeks ago has been satanic in origin. This makes sense, as we are seeking to follow God's lead onto a path full of potential setbacks and dangers that we cannot foresee, all for the sake of rescuing a little girl from a poor orphanage and from life in an institution, a life lived outside of a covenant family and thus perhaps a life spent without ever having heard the Gospel. When I considered more carefully what all this meant, I realized that I had been wrong to stay so frustrated with how frequent the setbacks had become. In Acts 5:41 we read that the disciples rejoiced that they had been persecuted because of the Name of the Lord. Not only had these disciples been told to cease their preaching of the Gospel, but they had been beaten for sharing the wonderfully Good News of salvation through Jesus. And their response was not anger or frustration or withdrawing inside themselves to avoid feeling more pain. No, it was to spend every day, both in the temple and in various houses, proclaiming the very thing for which they had just been beaten—the Gospel. They continued to follow God's command to spread the message of Jesus Christ, no matter what it might cost them, and they did it joyfully.

When I take a moment to compare their situation with ours, I cannot help but feel a bit foolish for reacting the way that I did. Even though both we and those early followers faced opposition, their situation was much more dire than ours. The danger of physical harm was obviously present for those men, and it takes no great leap to imagine that the threat of death was not far off, either. Such persecution of Christians was common at numerous points in the first several centuries A.D., and given what happens to Steven at the end of the seventh chapter, the possibility that they could be killed for what they were doing might well have occurred to them. And yet, in spite of that, they pressed on in open defiance of the command given them by the religious officials and continued to obey the Lord, apparently either without fear or with so much joy as to overshadow their fear almost completely. In our situation, we were merely faced with having to run all over town as we had to clear one hurdle after another. There was never any threat of physical danger, and certainly not of martyrdom, in this, and yet I responded with anger and not joy. The day was frustrating, and I will not deny that, though my frustration should have given way to the joy of being in God's service. Rescuing a child from a desperate situation is one way in which the cosmic war between the forces of the Lord and the forces of Satan is being played out in the world around us. Although the war's outcome has been decided, the battles between now and the end are ongoing and fierce, and it is a privilege and an honor to serve the Commander of the heavenly armies in some small way as He works to redeem His creation, and I thank Him for enlisting me. Soli Deo Gloria.

An awful Monday

Wow, it seems like we aren't very good at this blogging thing. Either we are so busy that we don't have time to write, or things are so calm that there is nothing to write about. Monday was certainly a day to write about, and this is the first opportunity we have had.

Monday was one of those days when nothing seemed to go right at all. We had two tasks to accomplish in addition to our daily routine. We wanted to apply for Josiah's and Gabriela's passports, and we wanted to get our medical forms notarized by our doctors. We thought we could accomplish those two things and still get some work done in the morning and Greg would still be able to teach most of his Latin class in the afternoon. We left our apartment about 9:00 in the morning to drop our computers off at my parents' house and pick Josiah up, because he had spent Sunday night with them. Once we got to my parents' house, we realized that we had left the passport applications and birth certificates at home. We were a little frustrated, but the post office is pretty close to our apartment, so we didn't think it would be a big deal. After getting Josiah ready to go, we drove back to our apartment and picked up the applications. When we got to the post office, we were encouraged to see that the lines weren't as long as we had expected. We waited for a few minutes, and both kids behaved perfectly. Gabriela slept the whole time, and Josiah chattered at us, and smiled and waved at the other people in the post office. Everything seemed to be going so well. When we got up to the counter, the postal worker looked through our application and said that everything looked good, but we needed copies of our driver's licenses. There had to be a copy of the front and back of each license for each application. We asked if we could make copies at the post office, and he directed us to the copier. It cost 15 cents per copy, and the machine only took change. We couldn't find any change, but we did find a 1 dollar bill and a 20 dollar bill after digging through the car and all our pockets and wallets. By this point, the line was a lot longer, but Greg went and stood back in line to ask them to change our money. Once he finally got to the front of the line, the postal worker told him she could break the 1, but didn't have enough change to break the 20. That left us 20 cents short of being able to make all the copies we needed. The only thing we could do was to drive back home and make the copies at our apartment. Once we did that, we drove back to the post office and got in the line again. Once we got to the front of the line for the third time, the worker began processing our applications. He got all the way through Gabriela's and was just beginning Josiah's, when he noticed one more problem. My driver's license had expired last month on my birthday, and he couldn't process their applications until I had a new license. We drove back to my parents' place and dropped the kids off so they could get some lunch and take their naps. Then we drove to the nearest BMV to get a new license. On the way we ran into road work and the consequent detour, and one of the slowest trains I have ever seen. We finally got to the BMV, and after waiting in yet another line, we renewed my license. The only complication was that the laminating machine jammed while trying to print my license, and they had to do it twice. Then we drove back to the post office, used the copier to make copies of my new license, and finally finished the applications for the kids' passports. Needless to say, we didn't get any work done that morning.

We were supposed to meet a friend of ours who is a notary at the doctors' office at 4:00. The doctors have been difficult to work with from the beginning, so we were both a bit concerned about this meeting. Our friend showed up right on time, and she helped us by notarizing a few other forms while we waited for the doctors. We were trying to move quickly, because Greg's Latin class also started at 4:00. He had given the quiz and answer key to the students' parents, and they were covering the class until he could get there. After a few minutes of waiting, Greg's doctor called us back. He was just about to sign the form, and we noticed he had the wrong one. We had dropped off a form with a mistake the first time, and I had gone back the next day with the correct one. Somehow, the form had never been switched in Greg's chart. The doctor was very irritated, and told us outright that it was all our fault. He grudgingly agreed to fill out the correct form (fortunately I had brought an extra copy of the correct form, because we never did find out what had happened to the one I dropped off earlier), and told us to go back to the waiting room while he completed it. Shortly after we sat down, the nurse told us that my doctor was ready, so we went back again. She made it clear that she thought it was stupid for us to ask her to sign in a blue pen, but did agree to do it, as long as we had one for her. (We had 3) About the time my doctor finished, Greg's doctor called us back over to his side of the office. He signed the form quickly, and left to meet with another patient. As soon as he walked away, we discovered that he had not signed one of the forms he was supposed to sign. The notary finished all of her work, and we all stood in the office and waited for more than 15 minutes for the doctor to come back. We were so afraid he would fight us when we told him that he had forgotten to sign a form, but we had to have it. Once he finally came back out, he did agree to sign the form with little more than an irritated eye-roll in our direction, so that was a relief. Then, our notary noticed that there was one line on the form that asked for the office or doctor's seal. She asked us what that was, and if we needed it. The doctor responded, "We don't have a seal," threw our pen back on the counter, and walked away. We decided that since the form was printed on their office letterhead, that would probably count as the office seal, and we left for Greg's Latin class.

He got to class just in time to answer a few questions, give them an assignment for next week, and dismiss them. Fortunately, the students and parents in the class are very, VERY understanding and supportive, and they were not upset at all.

Yesterday, we found out that Greg's doctor had made a small mistake on his form, and it will not be accepted by Mikaela's country at this point. After all that, we have to re-do it. Today, Greg made a few phone calls to try to find another doctor. Neither of us has any desire to go back to the doctors we had been using.

In the midst of all this frustration and discouraging news, there have been a few bright spots. Both our bio kids have been great through it all. Naps and feeding schedules have been chaotic as we have run all over town trying to take care of things, and both of our babies have nasty colds. Even so, they have remained cheerful and pleasant almost the whole time. My parents have been willing to help us out with anything we have needed. They have fed us, kept our kids, listened to us complain, and helped us figure out the complicated mess of adoption paperwork. Perhaps the most wonderful and encouraging thing that happened this week is that we got new pictures of our beautiful baby girl. We will post those soon.