Saturday was a good mail day.

We were excited for what awaited us in Saturday’s mail. First was our fingerprint appointments were assigned for our immigration approval. We had fully expected them to schedule us for one of the days when we were in on vacation with the kids. But much to our surprise we have appointments on August 3rd which works out perfect for us!

The second exciting piece of mail was a huge packet of documents from Lifelink, our homestudy agency. We almost have everything we need to get our documents sent to Russia. We are waiting on a letter of good standing from the state of IL for Lifelink and their new license. Their current license expires on July 18th. I am a bit nervous that somewhere down the road we might have a little drama with this situation. See, our homestudy agency is merging with Lutheran Social Services. But it is my understanding that they will still keep their name – Lifelink. In theory there shouldn’t be any issues with this, but we know to expect the unexpected. It was still nice to get the official homestudy and slew of other documents in our possession. One step closer….

The third thing that arrived is a little picture book we made to leave with our little son/daughter after trip one. During Blake’s adoption, we got word of his referral so quickly we didn’t have much time between finding out our travel dates and actually leaving. We created a photo book for him, but it didn’t arrive until the day after we left. As a backup I took a little album with plastic sleeves, a stack of pictures, and note cards. On the plane trip over to Vlad I created an album for him. Later our sweet blogger friend Amy took him the photo book that arrived late about a month before we returned for court. So we decided to go ahead and create our book now and just have it done. I did a 5x7 version this time instead of the 8x10. It seems it would be easier for him/her to carry. We are happy how it turned out. I took little phrases and translated them in Russian on two different online translators and then translated them back to English. This was a triple check to make sure I wasn’t putting something horrible like a cuss word or something in our book! I wish I could share the original version with you, but it isn’t possible so here is a picture version of our picture book. The pages – especially the front and back cover – are shiny so the photos on here aren’t that great. But in person it will be perfect for our little guy/gal!