Expectant Mother's Log: Friday, November 21, 2003. 3:28PM EST (according to the school clock).

Doug called me because he was full of information and just couldn't hold it in. He called INS this morning to see where our paperwork stood. Officer told him that our file was still in the pending section, but she would have it APPROVED either late today or Monday. That was enough to motivate him!

He called Frank Adoption and had a nice chat with Rosemary, who answered ALL our questions we had been wondering. We had a lot of exciting things confirmed (I'll get to that in a minute). Now he was just letting me know that he would be faxing all our financial information over to the CPA, so we could get that rolling, and submitted information to have his Letter of Employment done. This is ALL we have to do!

Once our letters of employment, CPA stuff, and marriage licenses arrive, we can take a quick trip up to Lansing to get it apostilled and send it off!

Now for the exciting part - Rosemary confirmed (once again) we will be receiving a boy. Referral time is
2-6 weeks... and that's from when FRANK receives our paperwork, not after Russia does. So we could, theoretically speaking, make our first trip by end of December/start of January. Once we know which region we're headed to, we will also know approximate wait time between the 2 trips; it's region specific.

And, she told us that the general age of infants being referred is 7-8 months. Sometimes there will be a 5-6 month old, but by the time they come to America, they're between 7 and 8 months. She did tell us to make sure we note that we cannot take the second trip until after Jan. 17 - that's semester break. It could be VERY soon after that when we have a child....

We are excited all over again! Ohmigosh - it will all come so quickly now!