The to-do list is dwindling

We are cranking out the paperwork!  Here is what we have accomplished since my last update:
~received Kevin's birth certificate
~received our marriage certificate
~obtained Kevin's employment verification (notarized)
~obtained police clearance for each of us (notarized)
~finished our financial statement
~applied for my passport
~applied for a renewal of Kevin's passport
~got fingerprinted for our IL and federal background checks (home study)
~copied our 2013 1040 tax form (home study)
~filled out the "typical monthly budget" form (home study)
~copied Kevin's and the kids' birth certificates (home study)
~filled out application (home study)

Our marriage certificates had 2 misspellings on them.  They were not important misspellings (not our names), but I did make some phone calls to get them corrected.  The new ones are on their way to us. Kevin had to deal with his employment verification.  When they gave it to him, he found some errors/missing items on it, so he had them re-do it.  The police clearances ended up not being nearly as hard as I'd envisioned.  I'm glad I contacted my adoption agency and asked some questions about these.  We don't have a police station in our town, so I was planning to go to the next town over for this.  That would have caused some issues.  They had me go to the county sheriff's department and that worked out well.  They were familiar with what I needed as they have done them for this purpose before.  When I got home with them, I realized one slight error/issue, but my adoption agency has told me how to deal with it (just need to make sure a specific statement is in our home study).

I've emailed Kevin's Employment Verification and our Financial Statement to our adoption agency to be looked over.  I should hear back today or tomorrow.  Hopefully, they are fine.  Kevin and I are both in the process of writing our answers to the big questionnaire from our home study agency.  It has about 50 questions, probing all areas of our lives- a lot of "feelings" stuff.  We need to get these finished up by the next meeting with our social worker, which is in 6 days.  I'm excited to give our social worker all of the documents we've been working so hard on.

Kevin and I have our physical exams next week, and the kids have theirs the week after that.  Getting those done will knock a big chunk off our to-do list!  And our pre-adoption classes start on the 25th.  We did find out that we will most likely still have to take a few China specific classes from our adoption agency.  Those are online.

When all of that is completed, we will be down to finishing up the home study (~3 more meetings with our social worker, the last one being at our house) and taking/printing some pictures.  We need 6 passport style pictures each of Kevin and me, 3 photos of the 2 of us together, and 8 photos of the 2 of us plus someone else (can be family, friends, neighbors, etc.).  I'm thinking about having a friend come over to take some of them.

Once the home study is complete, it will be sent to our adoption agency to be approved.  The next step will be our I-800A, which is permission from the government immigration department to bring a child from China to the US.  This involves an application (containing our approved home study), a fingerprint appointment, and a lot of waiting!  I believe these are currently taking approximately 60 days for approval.  Yikes, that is going to be a hard wait!

All of our documents for our dossier need to be notarized, state certified, and authenticated by the Chinese consulate before being assembled into our dossier and critically examined by our adoption agency.  The last step is to send it to China!!

Our 13 y/o has been asking a lot of questions, lately, about what all these meetings are for, etc.  She knew we had been looking into adopting from China, so I'm pretty sure she knew what was up.  We finally told the kids, last night.  They were all excited!  Our 4 y/o wants to go get Little Brother right now!!  We had to stop the 13 y/o from immediately jumping on FB or texting anyone to share our exciting news.  We haven't told our families just yet.  Kevin will probably call his family to share the news, because we mostly likely won't see them until Easter-ish.  I want to tell my family in person.  Luckily, our niece has a birthday in early March, so, hopefully, we won't have to wait much longer!  I am ready to let the cat out of the bag so we can talk freely!