Adoption Update : Major Milestone #2

Over the weekend we sent in major mailing #2 of 3, this one to the USCIS, and consisting of the I600-A application and a crapload of ancillary paperwork which will, it is fervently to be hoped, result in our obtaining the all-important I-171H form, which we will then send away in Major Mailing #3 to our China Adoption Agency, past which there is nothing to be done but the waiting. It was an odd experience dropping that package off at the fedex drop location - I was extremely reluctant to hand it to the very nice lady at the counter! I had to check and recheck the contents, the signatures, the cover letter, even though I had checked and re-checked all of it at the house ten times already (not an exaggeration). I was terrified that we'd done something wrong somehow, even though the paperwork is fairly straightforward, and our Adoption Assistant with Great Wall looked over everything and told us it looked great. I wonder what the hell that was all about?

The good news is that we're pretty much all set for Major Mailing #3, so as soon as we get that I-171H form back we can turn it back around almost immediately. It seems almost impossible that we've come so far after so many hurdles, but the end of the chase is in sight! For now we can take a break from worrying about it, as there's not a damn thing we can do any more - one less thing to worry about.

For the time being we are going to replace that energy focus with an almost complete makeover of our studio. I say almost complete because we're not going to repaint or anything - but we have another desk and are going to shelve-ize the hell out of it so that there's much more desk space for everyone, and enough shelf space for everything we need to put in this room. One thing living in Bloomington taught us, it's how to make small spaces work to their maximum capacity. We've been getting by in this studio space for a while - now we're going to really make it a nice place to work.