back in the saddle again

Today was a Thursday of immense production. It's curaazy how much we got done today, and even more impressive is the fact that my poor husband managed to get through all of it without having a wink of sleep last night.

So what did we do? Oh you know, everything. No, not everything, but almost, I swear! We started out by stopping off at our State Farm office to get a notarized letter from them stating that we have life insurance. I tell ya, what a nice group of people this is. Not only were they so happy to do it for us, but Dave Fredrickson, the guy who owns and runs the agency came out of his office to offer any support he could possibly give us, including introducing us to a local Ethiopian businessman he knows from the chamber of commerce. That's just so nice.
Our second stop was the bank. I had spent a while this morning calling around to various Washington Mutuals to find out if any of them had a notary on site, which surprisingly few of them do. We finally found one and went off to get a letter from them stating that we have a checking account and are in good standing. I was kind of dreading this. I feel so awkward when I go into an establishment and start stammering about international adoption and company letterheads and notarizations. Sometimes they just stare back at me with blank faces, like I'm speaking another language. But luckily the guy completely understood what we needed and was happy to do it for us. He just asked for a little time to complete it, so we left it with him and went off do do more tasks.
Our next stop was downtown. We had to get fingerprints (yes more,) notarizations for a bunch of different documents and passport-sized photos. Driving in downtown Chicago sucks and parking is even worse. But sleepless Matt managed to do it without loosing his sanity entirely. We parked in a garage that cost almost as much as this adoption is going to cost and trotted off to this weird little store that performs all of these services. It was a mad house when we got there and the man who owns it was running around yelling "two hours ago, nothing, now lunch time, everybody is here!" When it was our turn, we got inked, fingerprinted, photographed, notarized and outa there!
Once we made it alive out of downtown, we drove back up to the bank to pick up our letter, back home to make copies of everything (an absolute must in the adoption process) and then back out to the FedEx to send everything off. We sent the fingerprints to the FBI and all of the rest of the documents we had compiled off to KBS Dossiers, who I am sooooo glad we hired to put all of this stuff together for us.

So now, our dossier is almost complete! We have a couple of things left to do, but not much and then we still have our classes to take. I can't believe we are nearing the end of this part of the process. I was looking back at my older posts and remembering how intimidated I was and how I thought there was no way we would be able to accomplish this. I'm pretty darn proud of us, if I do say so myself!

And now, my poor husband can get some sleep.