Day trip to Austin

On Tuesday, we took a road trip to Austin to get our I797-C (US adoption approval form) "certified" by the Texas Secretary of State. We saved ourselves about 7-10 days vs. FedEx-ing and them taking 7 business days to process. So now... all of our paperwork is with the Chinese Consulate in Houston getting "authenticated". We hope to have that back Monday or Tuesday, and then we'll overnight all of our dossier stuff to our agency (Great Wall) in Austin... and maybe... just maybe... our dossier will be headed to China Friday, Feb 27th!!!! Once our dossier is in China, our referral wait time begins... currently 38 months!!! As far as the wait... it will probably get a little longer as China processes the backlog and then hopefully it will speed up... So who knows for sure... It's in God's hands so we won't worry about that.

As far as the trip goes, Abby was in school. We took Avery with us and she was a "little trooper". We spent almost 10 hrs in the car! While we were in Austin we ate at Freebird's (I know there are several in DFW now). We also went to our adoption agency and met most of the staff including the director. It was nice to be able to put names with faces. Everyone was so nice. We'll post again when our dossier leaves for China... hopefully next week!