Fingerprint appointment

I did, indeed, hear from our courier on June 12 to let us know she had FedEx'd our 12 state certified and Chinese authenticated documents back to us.  I was on "high alert status" for the FedEx man the next day.  I held back from approaching a FedEx truck that stopped at the neighbor's house that morning.  Luckily, another one (or the same one? how cruel would that be?) came that afternoon and delivered our wonderful documents!  I immediately inspected each document, taking time to appreciate the beautiful Chinese seal of authentication on each one.  I gasped as I noticed what appeared to be an extra set of staple holes in our home study and immediately emailed our adoption agency to ask if it would be a problem.  You see, removal of a state certification page voids it, even if you re-staple it to the document.  As it turns out, I believe the extra staple holes were from the home study being stapled together before the state certification page was added (it is rather thick and looks like it was difficult to staple).  The Chinese Consulate did authenticate it, so they were fine with it.  Whew!

Having received those documents gave me a task to complete- copying!  We have to send a full set of copies (including state certification and Chinese authentication pages) with our original documents to our adoption agency, so I got that done.  I also readied my next two FedEx envelopes with the exception of one air bill.  I need to pick up some more of those.

Today, we received our I-800A fingerprinting appointment!  It is on June 30th at noon.  We will have to drive about 2.5 hours to the USCIS office, so Kevin has scheduled himself to use a vacation day on the 30th.  We talked about the possibility of not waiting for our appointment and just walking in (most USCIS offices will allow this if they aren't too busy that day and you have the document that shows your scheduled appointment) but decided against it with our 2.5-hr drive and all.  Schedule wise, the 30th will be easier to manage than any day next week, and I'm not convinced walking in early saves that much time in the long run.  I guess this means I have two weeks to make sure my fingertips are adequately moisturized to produce "good" fingerprints.

Back to our timeline... as long as we don't get an RFE (request for evidence- meaning, they need more information on something), perhaps we could receive our I-800A approval 3 weeks after our fingerprint appointment, which would be July 21.  Then we would need to copy our approval, have it notarized, and send it off to our courier for state certification and Chinese authentication.  I'm going to hope to start stalking the FedEx man either August 1st or 4th for it's return.  And the moment I have that document back in my hands, I will make another copy and stick it in the FedEx envelope to our adoption agency.  I don't know if I can turn it around that same day or the next business day.  Either way, we could potentially be sending ALL dossier documents to our agency early August!  IF we don't run into any snags during this last step...

Thank goodness the kids are keeping me busy!  This week is kind of an off week- just tumbling for Nathan (which he is enjoying!), a couple softball games for Rebecca and me, and some miscellaneous appointments.  Perhaps we can squeeze in some swim time and a movie.  The girls are begging to go see the new How to Train Your Dragons 2 movie.