Oh my, I feel like I’ve been hit by a train. A Love Train!

It’s been a wonderful, fabulous, exhausting weekend! And I am so happy right now!
It started on Friday afternoon when we finally got that loooooong awaited email with that looooooong awaited date. September 3rd! Our Embassy appointment is September 3rd! This is awesome. We are so crazy excited to have finally reached this step. We are officially in the home-stretch, or the short-rows as my cotton-pickin’ Daddy would say.
Just a little bit longer!

So, what does this mean? It means that our paperwork will now be submitted to the US Embassy in [Capital City] and, on September 3rd, our in-country facilitator will take the kids and appear on our behalf for our visa appointment. The Embassy will then do their investigation which can take anywhere from 1-4 weeks and, when they are satisfied, they will issue visas for [A] and [G]. Once those visas are issued, we can fly to bring them HOME! FINALLY! Please pray that everything goes smoothly and quickly!

So that is great news! That made for a fabulous Friday. Then, we drove down to Dublin yesterday to see family and were surprised with a huge and wonderful adoption shower! Cue the spectacular Saturday! I am so overwhelmed at the amount of wonderful people who came from down the road and far away to spend this day with us. Thank you so, so, so much for ALL the love and support y’all have shown to us and [A] and [G]. It feels incredible to see how much love they have waiting for them here. I can’t wait for them to meet each and every one of you. And a big, special thank you to my sweet family for organizing the whole thing and making it happen! It was perfect!

And even perfecter (perfecter, why not?) was that, during the shower, I got an email on my phone with new pics and updates of our sweet kiddos! How wonderful to be able to share that moment with a houseful of some of my closest friends and family. The pics were great and the information was even better. Sad news first – [G] hurt her leg this week and has it all bandaged up. But, they took her for an x-ray and said that everything was fine, they just wanted to keep a bandage on it for a bit just to be safe. The good news – she doesn’t seem to care! She is smiling big in every pic we got! There are 2 possible reasons for this. The first is that, once again, a few inches away from her sweet smile is a big, fat, sweet sucker in her hand. That girl loves her some candy! The second reason is that she has a wonderful brother loving her and taking care of her. In our email, our coordinator said that [A] is an active and intelligent boy who is very close to his sister. And that [G] is a happy girl who is an “accomplice” of [A]‘s and wants to do everything her big brother does! I love that they love each other! And I love them, too!

Look at those sweet faces, who wouldn’t love them?