Paperwork

This phase of the adoption has been moving slower than we'd like.  Back when we were trying to decide what program and what agency to go through, I thought once we had figured that out, we'd move through the paperwork pretty quickly.  What I hadn't counted on was the rest of life still needing to happen: between each of us working part-time and caring for a 3-year old the rest of the time, that doesn't leave a whole lot of time for documents that require some focused, uninterrupted blocks of time to complete!  Add to that the holidays, a few other big decisions that required time and mental energy to research and resolve, a series of illnesses (I think I'm finally over my 5+week-long bout of flu-strep-sinus-pinkeye infections)...  so it seemed we hadn't been getting anything done with the adoption!

But this week we're finally seeing some progress:
- We both finished our 16-page personal history questionnaires for the home-study and turned them in!  These included lots of "thinking" questions about our childhood, marriage, parenting, health...  It took several weeks to get through them all but we finally did it.
- We had a dilemma for how to do our financial statement, since we need to list 2 years of income, and 1 of those years need to match a statement from our employer listing our current salary... but Gabriel just started a new job in August, so his current income has nothing to do with the past 2 years, and I got a raise in October, so mine doesn't match either!  Well I researched it this week and figured out that now that it's a new year, we can list our estimated earnings for 2015, to match our current salary!  After a couple emails back and forth with our placing agency, we've worked out the details and we have our financial statement - phew!  If you wait long enough some problems actually go away ;-)

Next step is getting the employment verification letters and police reports, and then we can start getting all the dossier documents notarized + certified + authenticated (more on that later).