What a day!

Greetings, Blogger Friends, Fellow Adoptive Families, and everyone else who lands on this page! What a day! It was a good day, mostly. I put the picture at the top on this post, so you can pretty much see what I was up to today. I had 23 documents apostilled in Springfield, IL. I dropped them off a little before 10am and they were ready a couple of hours later. It gave me time to do some shopping and have some lunch at the Cozy Dog Drive-in. Those docs will be off to our agency tomorrow. Between getting back to work, getting re-adjusted to Central Daylight Time and working on documents, this is pretty much what we've been up to.

On my way home I stopped off in Carlinville, Illinois where our county seat is located. I had to get a "certified" copy of the deed to our house. That actually ended up being a pretty easy task. If I would have stopped on the way to Springfield, I could have gotten it apostilled as well. Oh well, it can wait for the next batch of documents, which will hopefully be ready to go by the first week of June once our medicals, psych and clearances are ready.

Speaking of clearances, I was very excited to see an envelope from the FBI in my mailbox. The good news is that I have no criminal record. I was basically certain of this already, but it's good to see it in print. Clarion wasn't so fortunate. No, she's not a criminal either. However, the FBI rejected her prints. For those of you doing this stuff for the first time, check those prints. Make sure they're clear and that the technician rolls your fingers and gets the whole print. For some reason the quality of Clarion's prints weren't acceptable. What does this mean? Hopefully not a delay. She'll have to be re-fingerprinted. We tried today but it didn't work out. It'll have to be tomorrow. We're hoping we can get it done, sent to the FBI and have it expedited. They did provide special instructions and an ID number, so hopefully that means it will be processed quickly. It's unbelievable how many times adoptive families have to be fingerprinted and re-fingerprinted for an adoption. Uggh!

That's all for now! We're still hoping to return to Vlad in early August. That may be a bit premature, but the Lord bids us to, "Ask," so that's our prayer. Speaking of prayers, please keep the Bridges family in your prayers as they leave Vlad and head to Moscow. And we rejoice with Kyle and Ashley at their first referral. God bless you all.

Love,

Joel & Clarion

P.S. - Yesterday we had the joy of celebrating Nadya's 18th birthday. Her birthday was actually Saturday the 14th, but we had the party last night. She had a blast! She'll be leaving us to return home to Russia on June 21. It's been a great year. We highly recommend hosting an exchange student, especially to those who have adopted from Russia. Check out www.americancouncils.org.