End of November Update

No, we haven't been watching Survivor. We're simply trying to survive being parents of a 2-year old.

We're also waiting for our paperwork to come back from immigration. We traveled to Yakima to the Department of Immigration back in October to submit our paperwork and get fingerprinted. We were told that by going directly to Immigration rather than the Dept of Homeland Security to get fingerprinted shaves about a month's time off the whole red-tape process. It was a day-long excursion over to Yakima, but worth it to save a month, if that's really what it ends up being. Not to mention the fact that the fall colors over the mountain passes were beautiful.

We didn't know what to expect in Yakima. Homeland was near Seattle...big building, big crowd, ethnically diverse. Yakima was a small one-storey building in a downtown neighborhood, and it was the three of us with three other families waiting to be taken care of. We were in and out in about 20 minutes. I don't remember how long we waited at Homeland last time, but I can assure you it was MUCH longer than 20 minutes.

As soon as the paperwork comes back to us, we'll then have everything ready to take to Olympia, have it state sealed, then given to our agency to submit to China. There's still a lot to be done and a lot more waiting.

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving celebration. We had a good laugh towards the end of dinner. Lily has become quite the comedian. Julie asked all our guests to share something they are thankful for. One young friend began by saying "I'm thankful for..." and paused, when Lily jumped in with a loud, "MONEY!!!"