Excited but Are you kidding me?

Well, we leave in 4 days. We are so excited!! I am feeling like we are in pretty good shape, we are mostly packed, I have Greyson plus Marge all set and my 2 1/2 page "to do" list only has about 3 things left on it. I have been nervous about the flight but today after reading my devotions and spending some time in prayer, I have complete peace.

 So many people have let us know that they will be covering us in prayer while we are gone and a lot of people have offered to have Greyson over for a play date or pick him up from school so I can get things done. Also I have a list of friends who want me to give their numbers to both my mother in law and mom while we are gone, in case they need a break or help with Greyson, they are willing to pitch in. WOW! The support is so great and we are just so thankful. And so that being said along with  prayers for safety and a good trip we are asking for everyone who reads this to really, really be praying for our paperwork on our behalf.  I got a bummer of a phone call today regarding our paperwork and I just don't want to have to deal with it.

Here is our current situation:  We are due in court on March 25, after our court hearing, we wait for our adoption decree. This decree takes about 2 weeks or 14 business days to process before sent to the embassy for a Visa appointment for Charlie to leave the country. If everything goes perfect we could get a call to return to Korea within 18-21 days of our court date. This would be awesome!! But if the birth mother or a relative would like the adoption decree for personal records then the court must send it to them. This seems easy enough except that a lot of birth mothers move or are hard to locate and so the decree does not get delivered. The court will make 3 attempts to try to deliver the decree. If all three attempts fail then it is mandatory that the decree gets posted to a private website that birth mothers have access to. It must be posted there for a at least 17 days. After the 17 days our paperwork can then begin to start the actual 14 day process. So, basically the wait in between visits can be anywhere from 3-8 weeks. Obviously, we are hoping for 3 weeks.

Today our caseworker called and said that a bunch of our paperwork for the US government expires the first week of May. This means that if we do not have the call to go get Charlie we will have to once again redo a ton of paperwork. You get one free pass from our government for an extension, they do not charge you for this. If your child is not home 18 months after you originally sent your paperwork in you can redo all your paperwork for free. This free extension lasts one year, we have already done the free extension so this paperwork would not be free. Lets just say that I never knew filing one piece of paper could be so costly in addition to that we will need to get FBI clearance again, new physicals for every member of our family and update our home study. All of those things have fees included as well. I do not want to seem like I am complaining about the money, I am not worried about that, every time we need it, it is there. Our God is faithful. I am just so sick of this!!!

The killer is that we may very well be home from Korea with Charlie before any of these updates need to be done. The bad thing is that we just don' t know until we get the call and all of this paperwork takes time. After figuring all of this out today we received an email that said we needed to have two forms filled our before we leave on Monday because the clearances we need can take a few weeks to process and if we wait until we get home, it might not be enough time. So about twenty minutes ago , I finished the paperwork and it will get sent out tomorrow. Ok, all of that said, we just REALLY need prayer that our decree has no hold ups and we get word as fast as possible that we can go back to pick Charlie up. If that happens none of the paperwork issued will matter!

For now,we have done what we can and we wait in great anticipation to meet our little boy! Thank you all so much for your support!!