Starting All Over Again...

So today I received our new instruction booklet for our Ethiopian Dossier.  Yay (she says sarcastically and unenthusiastically, with a sigh).  Yeah, I have to order new birth certificates (I had ordered extras for our Nepal dossier, but apparently those decided to disappear), get new blood tests, new references, and a new burst of energy (among other things).  I thought I might be overwhelmed by all this, but I think I'm okay.  Somehow, this dossier doesn't seem nearly as daunting as I thought it would be.  Yes, it can get a little annoying at times.  For instance, I can't tell you how flustered some notaries get when I tell them that they have to write out the entire date (i.e. March 15, 2010 instead of 3/15/10), or that I need their commission expiration to be at least 14-18 months out.  And now I'm going to have to tell everyone that everything has to be written in BLUE ink.  So now I will have to go through the explanations all over again, and inevitably, someone will write something incorrectly, or use the wrong ink color, and then I will have to have it redone.  But so goes the international adoption train.  Everyone says that this ride is really hard, but when you first start, you hope that you might be the exception to the rule.  It's kind of like when you are a freshman in college.  You feel like you know everything, but after a couple of years, you realize you know very little.  Now that we've been on this bumpy ride for a while, we realize that is is really really hard.  Not much easy about it.  But everyone says it's worth it, so I'm going to focus on that.

The picture I attached to this post makes me chuckle.  I mean, do they really have to put a picture of a guy stressed out by paperwork on the front cover of our dossier guidelines?  We already know it's stressful.  Couldn't they have just put a nice restful beach scene on there?  Something that will increase our serenity and not our stress.  Ah, the irony of it all....

I also wanted to say thank you to all of you who commented on last Friday's blog.
It was really encouraging to have people support our decision, because it was such a difficult decision to make.  I struggled with a little bit of guilt as we made the switch, but now I am truly getting more and more excited to bring little Liam or Eliana home (those are some of the names we are working on right now....well, those are names we've had for a long time...we'll see if we use them).  Thank you all for your continual love and support.  It truly means SO much.

(And for those of you who have gone private on your blogs, would you mind sending me an invitation?  I would LOVE to keep up with everyone on Nepal route also. )