Approved!

Finally! It arrived! US Citizenship & Immigration Services (after 2 whole months) have "determined that (we) meet the eligibility requirements as the adoptive parents of a child who will be adopted under the Hague Convention …… Your I-800A application is hereby approved."

Of course it arrived the one day, the ONLY day, in the past 2 weeks that I wasn't able to be home when the mail arrived. So first thing tomorrow morning I head to the local UPS store to have a notary watch me sign a piece of paper stating that the copy I have is true to the original (because we keep the original and only send a copy to China). Then it's off to the county Clerk of the Court to certify the notary's signature. Then to the Maryland Secretary of State to certify the Clerk of the Court. Then to the FedEx store to make copies of everything and overnight it to our courier who will take it all to the US State Department and Chinese Embassy in DC next Tuesday (because of course this happens on a federal holiday weekend!) She will then overnight it to our adoption agency. With luck and lots of prayers we might be DTC (dossier to China) by the end of next week. That's a huge milestone. Then it's only taking about 9-14 days to be officially logged in (LID) and then the next big milestone comes about 50 days after that - when China asks us to sign a letter stating that we really do want to adopt Amy.

I won't go into how many more weeks it will take to go through immigration round 2 and the final steps before we travel. It gets depressing when it's all listed at one time. We'll just celebrate that we've completed another step in the process and hope to have another celebration next week.