Our little beauty

First, here's the picture we received this week. Cutie pie, isn't she?

We are another day closer to bringing her home and that is SO exciting!

This week we chose the nursery bedding and today we received the long-anticipated I-171H! YEA, God! Now we can get the notarized home study copies and as soon as the passports arrive, everything goes to the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) for authentication. TECO authorization is the final step before everything goes to Taiwan for court dates. Friends have said their TECO authorization only took a matter of days, so we're praying that our passports arrive this week and that our TECO office moves as quickly as theirs did. If so, everything could be going to Taiwan in the next couple of weeks!

Thanks for all your prayers.

Get fingerprinting done...check!

The Citizenship & Immigration Services process requires that we be fingerprinted. No biggie, right? Well you'd think that since we live in the capital city, we could just run downtown and do that, but that's not how it works. The state's USCIS office is in Charleston, a two-hour drive away and you have to come at the appointment time they set. Not a huge deal, but it does take a bit more planning.

Our appointment was at 9:00 a.m. Tuesday. Not wanting to get up at an unearthly hour and have to fight highway and Charleston traffic at morning rush hour (and also really needing to have some time away together), we decided to turn it into a 24-hour vacation. Yea!

After work Monday evening we packed, turned our dogs and home over to a friend for the night (thanks, Tom!) and drove to North Charleston. We stayed in a beautiful Residence Inn, had a great breakfast there in the morning and then set off for fingerprinting.

They use a cool machine, not the old ink-style; it was neat and very efficient. Michael's fingerprints went smoothly but mine (of course) took forever! Basically, I have no fingerprints. OK, so you can see them...but barely. They were bad when I was younger but so many years of typing, etc. has worn off the rest. I've known this for a long time and we both warned the poor man that it would be challenging but he still had to do what he had to do, and I am so thankful he was patient and pleasant. (Sorry no pictures of this part of the journey but they don't allow cameras or even cell phones in their office; you have to turn them in and pick them up when you leave.)

We had planned to finish with CIS by 10:00, then explore Charleston for the day. It's a beautiful city with so much history everywhere you look. Unfortunately, it was chilly, gray and rainy, so we found a mall and walked around exploring stores, sales and good coffee for several hours. Still VERY relaxing; no talk of anything work or church-related. A nice drive home and a yummy late lunch at Chili's, then we went home and took a nap! (I know...we are so old and boring, but this was a beautiful, relaxing time for us, especially since we had just jumped another hurdle towards bringing Kaley home!) Lord willing, I'll soon be able to post that our paperwork is in the hands of the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office!