Blessed Beyond Measure

When you hear about the paperwork involved in adoption, you never actually believe it could be true!!! So many people warned me: "There is more paperwork than you could ever imagine". I have to admit, I thought they were just wimps. I was an executive assistant to an owner of a company with 10,000+ employees, 37 factories.......I CAN DO PAPERWORK like nobody's business!!!! Well, we got our Dossier(official adoption paperwork)instructions this week and boy WAS I WRONG!!!! The paperwork is insane. Here is the short list:

- Letter of employment from employers (notarized)
- Clearance letter from local police (notarized)
- Letter from two references (notarized)
- Reference letter from bank (notarized)
- Health authorization letter from physicians (notarized)
- Power of attorney from Secretary of my State
- Power of attorney from agency State
- Birth Certificates (notarized)
- Marriage License (notarized)
- Family letter to Ethiopian Gov.(notarized)
- Power of attorney for agency rep in ET
- Passport photos (even though we already have passports)
- Fingerprints for FBI
- Fingerprints for Illinois State Police
- Family financial Statement
- 1040 Tax form (notarized)

I never in a million years thought I could muster up the energy and organization(more importantly, the cooperation from all the agencies involved) to gather ALL these docs in ONE week. Well, I am proud to say.....I DID IT!!!! Every single piece of paper is filled out and sent to the appropriate agency........I DID IT!!!! I feel such a huge sense of relief!

Getting all this paperwork out of the way makes me feel like we are even closer to knowing what God has in store for us........who he has chosen to place in our care......who he has chosen for us to love and cherish!!!! That has to be the hardest part of this process, doing all this silly paperwork and writing checks and persevering through the bureaucracy and not even knowing who you're doing it for. Thank goodness we have faith to know it is all worth it and even though we don't know who they are, God does......he has chosen them for us already and we just have to have the faith to know he's in charge and we just need to do what he says and follow along with patience!

Here's to a productive week!!!