We did it!!!!!!

We took the plunge yesterday, Monday and we drove to Dallas for a walk-in at the USCIS fingerprint center.  There was a security guard at the front desk, showed him our appointment letters for the end of the month and our medical expedite letter from the pediatrician, he was rude and kept telling me we had to call the 1800 number to reschedule if we could not go to the assigned appointment, I said you don't understand we want an early appointment because of the expediting and your Missouri office told us to walk-in, so I took a deep breath and kindly said, please call a person who works here that handles the appointments so we can ask them about taking us early, so he did, and the guy told us to come back in an hour and they could squeeze us in, so we hung out in Dallas a bit and went back and were fingerprinted.  I was finally able to speak to our assigned case officer today and she is printing our approval letter tomorrow and federal expressing it to us, we will have it Thursday morning!!!  Plus the last package of documents were apostilled today in Austin, thanks to my niece who lives there, she was kind enough to drive it to the Secretary of States office and then federal express it to me, so I will receive those tomorrow.  This package will be sent to a couple in Laredo who will be leaving on Saturday for Eastern Europe and they will hand deliver our babies.  Then the USCIS approval letter will be sent to my niece again and she will take it down on Monday and get it back to me by Tuesday and I will federal express to another kind lady from Houston who is leaving next Friday for Eastern Europe, she will hand deliver this last piece of document and it will complete our dossier.  Then we sit and wait for the Eastern Europe Government to approve us and send us a letter to travel.  Supposedly our travel date is anywhere from 5-7 weeks after we are submitted.  So hopefully we will be traveling during the summer, kids will be out of school and we will have great weather, because I understand it gets pretty cold over there in the winter months.

We are still working on the financing and have some deals in process to sell some items of value and hopefully be able to fully fund the adoption, other than running up our credit cards, which we have already been doing.  On another note, my husband spoke to his brother last night about our adopting a special needs child and he was not very positive, as a matter of  fact, he seemed a little bitter.  They have a son with Autism and he said you really need to think about a special needs child because ours has changed our lives forever, we never get to go anywhere as a family and enjoy outings.  We fully plan on carrying on our lives with Arielle just as if she did not have down syndrome, we will still go to church as a family, vacation, camp, swim, go to dinner and hire a babysitter for adult date nights.  We know down syndrome and any other special need will be a challenge, but should never stop your life from being full of fun and enjoyment.