One more step...

Yes, that's right. Our documents are now state certified! Yahoooo! They will be on their way to the Chinese Consulate in Houston tonight for authentication. This is the last step before being translated and mailed to China.

I took yesterday off work and took everything to be state certified. My parents went with me for moral support and daddy drove as well. It was a long and exhausting day to say the least. I'm so thankful they were able to go with me. I had two county certifications to take care of before getting to the Sec. of State's office. Once we got there I was told that the birth certificates I requested from the State Vital Records office were not the right ones! What??? I stated in bold and underlined in my request that I needed a "pen in hand" signature. The lady at the SOS office was nice enough to go ahead and begin certifying the rest of the documents while we went in person to the Vital Records office and swapped out what I had for the right ones. We went back to the SOS office (knowing exactly where to go this time!) had the birth certificates certified and we were done!

It was such a relief! When we walked out of that office I was almost in tears! I was honestly choking them back. I was holding onto those documents for dear life. I know those of you who have adopted understand. It's one more step to check off the list. It's one step closer to your baby. I've wanted to adopt my whole life. I have the most wonderful husband a girl could ask for and we're finally here... our paper work is almost finished. we have our referral...the most precious gift from God and this made us one step closer to him.

All the copies have been made and I'll mail it to Houston after work. Hopefully we'll have the packet back within two weeks and we can move on to the next step. We also received a big packet from Holt in the mail on Monday. It included everything from our placement agreement to our visa applications and preliminary travel info. I'll tackle that next! Now I'm just wondering how everything else on my to-do list is going to get done before travel!