Paper Pregnant!

So after 9... yes, 9... whole days of waiting since our application was officially sent off to the agency, I got the much anticipated call today!  Now, I will preface this entire post with two points:

1. I know that 9 days is absolutely NOTHING in the scope of this whole thing, and I need to get used to the waiting game.

2. I also know that there will be much more important and heavily anticipated phone calls to receive too.

... but so far, this is all I've got to go on, and I'm excited because we're finally technically officially approved by the agency to begin our journey.

"Katie, I have good news for you..." said the cheerful voice on the phone, "you're Paper Pregnant!"  Ha!  It was a cute and funny way to say it, but it may prove to be fairly accurate. They keep reminding me that this process could go very quickly for us, due to the gender and conditions accepted on our Medical Conditions Checklist.  Now, I don't want to rely on this solely and get my hopes up, and who knows what may happen to delay things, but there is a possibility that we could have our fourth child 9 months from now.  So, it is somewhat like the time frame of a pregnancy.... but thank God this one involves a distinct lack of vomiting on my part!

So, what comes next? Well, now we begin the real paperwork.  We have stacks and stacks of forms to fill out; we each have to submit our own autobiography; get all certified copies of all important documents, then get them notarized, then verified by the state from which they came, then approved by the Chinese consulate before being sent back here; get passports in order, and about a thousand more things in addition to that, including the 4 home study interviews.  Despite the enormous mountain to climb (or maybe the Great Wall to climb? Pun intended!), I am jut giddy to get this underway.  I know the waiting is a pain, and finding time to do the paperwork and track things down in addition to the insanity of our daily life will be tough, but again, it's similar to pregnancy: absolutely torturous as those months of involuntary bulimia, killer acid reflux, and general physical discomfort may have been, at least I knew it all meant that we were making progress and getting a little closer every day to meeting our new little one.  Same thing... just without the same amount of Zantac and no one's feet are in my ribs!  Sounds like a good thing on all sides!

Hopefully I can finally open this blog up too and tell everyone what's going on.  I don't like having to be quiet about it!