Feeling zen

Ever since Sunday when our flights were booked, I have been feeling fairly zen. I believe my body just had enough of my soaring-through-the-roof stress level and decided that whatever happens, happens so I might as well relax a little. It has been a nice change! I think Kerry is relieved my mood swings are calming as well. Its almost like I really am pregnant!

We now have 3 coats of very red paint on Kariana's room and it is looking good. We will hopefully finish that up in the next few days with the boarder and the crib assembly which will be nice. Kerry heads to Chicago tonight for our visa appointments which are at 9 am tomorrow at the Colombian Consulate there. Hopefully everything goes smoothly for him and he comes home with 2 visas in hand!

We have been busy researching where we would like to stay while we are on in Colombia. Since I will be there for almost 2 months, its a fairly important decision. We narrowed it down to 2 and our Lutheran Social Services contact is seeing if our first choice (Hotel Paris) has room for us. All the hotels we would stay at are only open to adopting families, many of them have meal plans that you can choose from, cribs in the rooms, strollers/toys/baby gear you can use while you are there and laundry facilities. I may not want to come home after having them cook, clean, and do laundry for me for 2 months! I'm really looking forward to getting to know some other adopting families and exploring Bogota with them. These family-friendly hotels are the main reason we decided it was safe to take the boys with us. We are so glad they will get to experience this journey from the beginning with Kariana with us instead of them coming into the pictures after I get home with her 2 months later. It really will be a family affair from the beginning and I am already not looking forward to having my guys leave after the first 3 weeks. I'm not going to think about that part now though!

We got our web cam up and running last night and had our first conversation with my sister Carrie in Arkansas. It was fun! We are now on Yahoo Messenger as kmelcherii or Skype as kerryandcresta.melcher although we haven't tried the Skype account yet. Hopefully after tonight I will be an old pro on it. Many families who have travelled have used Skype to keep in touch with family back home and we will too. Kerry and I will also use it after him and the boys come home so we can talk everyday for free if was want too.

That is about it for now. I am still busy gathering things from family and friends that we will be using while we are down there. Thanks everyone for all your contributions! Please keep us in your prayers as we get closer to our travels.

Travel dates!!

We got 'em today! Today I booked our tickets so the count down is on. We all leave 2 weeks from today, July 11, to go down. That means that 2 weeks from right now, we will be in Bogota, hopefully at our hotel by now and through customs. We land at 7:30 pm and there is no time zone difference there so hopefully everything goes smoothly. It was VERY exciting to be actually booking our tickets. We got our apostilled documents back and let Lutheran Social Services know on Friday. Then they worked with the orphanage to verify the dates they would be available for the presentation. They usually only do presentations on Monday or Tuesdays so its fairly important we are down there for one of those days or you might have to wait a week. Presentation is where the baby will be presented to us and we take her from there. Unofficially it is called 'Gotcha Day' because from then on, she is ours! It is summer down there too so they had to make sure with vacations and things which weeks would work for them. 2 weeks is the minimum they like to give so you can get decent plane tickets and to apply and receive your visitors visa. So now that we have plane tickets, we (meaning Kerry) can go to Chicago and apply for our visas. He will go one day this week and will have them in hand when he leaves. At least we don't both have to go. A day trip to Chicago is bad enough! We booked our tickets so that Kerry and the boys are going to stay for 3 weeks and come home on July 31. That means that Kaleb will turn 7 while we are in Colombia. I believe he thinks that is pretty cool but tonight he brought up the idea of having a 'friends' party which we haven't done before so we said we would have to talk about it since I won't be home until much later. He seemed fairly upset at this so his 'friends' party may have to be celebrated a month or two after his birthday.

We have been busy preparing at home too. We had the internet people come a week-ago Friday and run a new internet line for us in the basement where we moved the desk so that left Kariana's room about empty. Tonight we painted the bottom half (very, very red) but I'm sure it is going to look great. Another coat tomorrow night and a boarder after that and then we can finally assemble her crib that has been sitting in a box for the past couple of weeks. I really want to get her room ready before we leave so that Kerry doesn't have to deal with getting that ready while I'm gone.

The boys are getting excited again now that we can actually count down when we are leaving. Its so fun watching them get excited about their new baby sister. They get so animated! I hope they do well on the plane rides. Total travel time is 12 hours that includes a 4 hour stop in Miami so at least its broken up quit a bit. Hopefully we can do a lot of walking around to wear them out for the second half of the trip down. At this point, they are very excited to go on the big plane so hopefully that enthusiasm doesn't wear off about an hour in.

I'll keep you updated as things are happening!

Article 5 is in Bogota, FBI fingerprints come back to haunt us

Great news today! Our Article 5 was approved and sent to Bogota in 1 week (they had estimated it would be 1-2 weeks so it was on the quick end). If everything else was in order, that means we could book our travel for 2 weeks from today which would be July 5. However, our dreaded FBI fingerprint/background checks are now preventing us from making those arrangements until they are on the way to Colombia. We got the background checks in the mail on Saturday (no arrest records for either of us, yeah!!), we had them notarized today, and at noon I sent them off to the Minnesota secretary of state to have them apostilled (an official seal that verifies the notary is a true and current notary). Based on some documents I had done not to long ago, I expect a very quick turn around time so we should get them back on Wednesday or Thursday. After I get them back, I will FedEx them to Bogota. Once they are on the way, THEN we can make travel arrangements so it looks like we will be traveling around July 9th or so as of right now. If that happens, it would be a few days earlier than we had been planning but this is fine with us.

We did find out some bad news today. There appears to have been a change in the processing of visas to Colombia and the last 2 families from Lutheran Social Services has had to make a personal appearance to request the visas at the nearest Colombian consulate which for us is in Chicago. At least only 1 parent has to go but that is going to suck if we have to go. Nothing like a 13 hour round-trip drive for something that will probably take less than an hour. In the past, they have allowed the visa requests by mail and then they would FexEx them back to you. Any one up for a road trip with me??

Now that we know traveling is imminent, I am starting to go into panic mode. I feel like I have so much to do! I have been connecting with other families who traveled to Colombia recently and got some great advice. I also got this awesome packing list from one of them (thanks, Phyllis!!) and some other great lists of things to do in Colombia. I now have about 5 lists going and really need to consolidate so I don't forget anything. I still need to collect some things from a couple of friends too and my parents brought back a ton of stuff from Carrie for me that I need to get from them.

Kerry and I also need to make a trip to the cities so we can get our fingerprints taken AGAIN. These are for the Department of Homeland Security and have to be done at a Federal Building since our fingerprints taken at our local police department must not be good enough. We had to do this last year as well and thought we were going to get out of doing them again but part of the US government approval we got last week stated that our fingerprints had to stay current through the end of the adoption process. Our fingerprints expire on July 30 so they have to be taken before we leave since I for sure will be out of the country and Kerry may or may not be back by then. Ah, one more thing for us to do........

Our fingerprints are done!

Great news today. I called the FBI today since the supervisor never called me back on Monday and the guy proceeded to tell me that both of our fingerprint cards are done processing. Yeah!!! I guess the supervisor must have worked some magic so I guess I will forgive her for not calling me back! I asked when I can expect them back and he says they should be in the mail by no later than next Monday. I don't really understand why they might not be in the mail until then if they are complete now but I guess that is the government for you. I realized today that I have now talked to the FBI at least 3 times and sent at least 2 packages to them. How many people can say that?? And we aren't even criminals!

Lutheran Social Services was very excited to here this latest development so we are back on track as of right now. I'm hoping to be traveling by mid-July. Yesterday I faxed Kariana's immigrant form to the US Embassy in Bogota so now they have my application which they will put together with the Article 5 letter that the US government is sending to them based on our approval we received last week. It was interesting to try to figure out how to fax to a foreign country. I felt like I had to enter about 30 numbers into the machine as it patiently waited for me to figure out what I was doing. It is truly amazing (and frustrating) the amount of steps we have to go through AFTER we get referred the baby. I thought all the hard work was done to get to this point but man was I wrong on that one. I believe we will know our travel dates in about 2 weeks.

The boys and I all had our shots for Colombia last week. Kerry went a couple weeks ago so everyone is medically ready to go now. My arm was sore for 3 days since I needed more shots than anyone (3 shots). I need more because I am staying a lot longer than everyone else so I could be exposed to more. I also needed one more than Kerry because I couldn't get one of the shots I needed a few years ago when we went to Burma because I was pregnant with Cohen at the time. She wrote us all RXs for travelers diarrhea and altitude sickness since Bogota is about 8,500 feet. Every time the doctor would say 'diarrhea' Kaleb would get all grossed out and whisper to me 'She's talking about poop! Yuck!" Cohen wasn't paying attention to what the doctor was saying because he was like a crazy child running all over the place. I blame the sucker the nice desk nurse gave us as we waited for the doctor to come in. Ha!

We are approved by the US government!

It was a good day yesterday for the adoption process. We got the official notice in the mail yesterday that the US government has approved us to adopt Kariana. Yeah!! Yeah!! It took 15 business days (not counting Memorial Day in there) for us to get the notice back. Now we wait again. If I understand everything correctly, the US government will now forward a letter called the Article 5 to the US Embassy in Bogota, Colombia explaining that we have been approved. Once this happens, then we can apply to the Colombian government. Hopefully the Article 5 takes less than a week. I have our Colombian government application all ready and we can fax that down so hopefully that goes quick too.

In the mean time, I called the FBI again about our fingerprint cards/background cards. The great news is that both our cards are now in the system being processed which is a big improvement over last week when they weren't even entered yet. The bad news is that this lady told me they have been taking 13 weeks! I about starting hyper-ventilating since the guy last week told me 9-10 weeks. I pretty much begged to know if there was anything I could do to speed the process along since we were adopting and we couldn't go get the baby until these were done. She kind of perked up when I mentioned adoption and said, " Oh, you are adopting?" After I confirmed it, she said she could transfer me to the customer service supervisor to talk to her about my request but that lady was gone for the day so I had to leave a message. I'll let you know what I hear on Monday. If it really is 13 weeks, then we won't be traveling until the end of July. I think I may have to go into zombie mode if we can't travel until the end of July as I am not sure if I can emotionally handle waiting that long to see my daughter. Please pray for us!

On a happier note, I finally figured out that there was a setting I needed to change on our Blogger account that would allow people to post comments even if they don't have one of those accounts they have listed. That means that you should be able to post as your name or Anonymous and then just leave your name in the post. I wish I would have looked into that sooner!

Not much happening yet

We got some bad news today. About a month before they gave us the referral, we were told we needed to update our FBI background checks because they are only valid for 6 months. So Kerry and I made ANOTHER fingerprint appointment at the Rochester police station and got our fingerprints taken for the 5th time in 2 years. Anyway, I got those sent off to the FBI on April 16 and were told they were taking 8-10 weeks to get back because they used to prioritize adoption background checks but now they are just put in line with the rest of them. Of course, we all know what happened 3 weeks later. Well we found out that we will not be able to travel to Colombia until the background checks are back, we have them notarized, apostiled (for those of you who don't know what this is, you send a notarized form to the secretary of state where they put another form on top stating they have verified that the notary is a true and current notary. Talk about redundant), then we can send it to Colombia to be translated. Only after all that happens can we travel. I called the FBI today to see where they are because it has been almost 7 weeks but I was told our fingerprint cards aren't even in the system yet so the background checks haven't started. He told me they get about 10,000 per week! He also told me they are averaging 9-10 weeks. I called Lutheran Social Services and told them the news. She still thought that would only postpone our travel by about a week, maybe 2 so it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be but I doubt we will be traveling before July 15th now. Sucky!!!

At least we can continue to get the US government and Colombian government approvals, ask for our visas etc. while the background checks are happening. If those things take a little longer than expected, then the background checks might not slow us down any more than anything else.

I also talked to the LSS worker who just got back from Colombia but she wasn't able to get any new pictures because Kariana is in a foster home and not at the orphanage. I can't decide how I feel about that. I think its good for Kariana because I bet she is getting better care than at the orphanage but transition might be a little harder because she will have had one caregiver. Bettina told me the orphanage has a goal of having all children under 1 in foster families because the one-on-one care the babies receive is better for them. We will still meet Kariana at the orphanage so we won't be able to see where she has spent her life so far but we will get to meet the foster mom and learn her schedule, etc.

On a positive note, I found a crib set that I fell in love with. Its red, white, and pale green with dragonflys and lady bugs on it. Its adorable so I ordered the wallpaper boarder to match and now I'm trying to decide if we want to paint or wallpaper the bottom half of the room under the boarder. Kerry and I ordered her crib last week from Babies R Us and its white so the room could really use some color since the walls are white too. I am trying to stay busy with these decisions since otherwise I am sitting around twittling my thumbs waiting for something to happen! I am happy the crib is ordered so that only leaves us with a couple of gates for the top and bottom of the stairs to get. I still don't know what we were thinking getting rid of those. Uhh!!