15 Miles From Nowhere

SO, last week was a big week.  It's been crazy, but I've finally found a few minutes to update... After what felt like a million delays, our homestudy was FINALLY ready, so last Monday (8/17) I went to pick it up. Since the homestudy agency is in the OKC metro I took the bulk of our dossier to be apostilled at the same time.  An apostille is a state seal, where the state verifies that the notary is valid.  Anyway, we live about 4 1/2 hours from the homestudy agency & state capitol, so we drove up to take care of it in one day.  We saved probably about 2 weeks of mail time that way.  My mom went with me (BLESS HER!), which was awesome because it was a very stressful day.  We had a couple of hiccups, a lot of driving across the OKC metro, and a crazy day, but at the end of the day, this is where we are at: Our completed homestudy was overnighted to USCIS to catch up with the application that we filed last March.  They have had it over a week now, so we are hoping for a

So... I haven't blogged in a VERY long time.  Here's what has been going on with the adoption process since last summer... Last summer we had to put the adoption on hold for a little bit while we sold our house in Yukon.  It had been a rental property, and when the tenants moved out, we decided to put it on the market and use the proceeds toward the adoption.  Well, it didn't sell for several months.  And by the time we repaired things for sale, paid the mortgage for several months, and lowered the price we ended up basically breaking even.  So that plan failed.  Oh well, that's life!  But while paying two mortgages, having to do necessary repairs to this house (which we had just bought the prior winter & needed quite a bit more than we thought), we were financially drained. So we put everything on pause.  Then last August I went back to work.  I'd say that was a mistake for our family, but it gave us a big boost financially, so I can't.  But it was an i