Signed, Sealed, and Delivered!

Today was the day!  I hand delivered all of the paperwork that we have been working on over the past month and a half to our agency.  I have been looking forward to this moment since we started working on the mile-high stack of papers.  Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite a mile, but it had to be close! 

Before dropping everything off, I went to Kinkos to make copies of everything we had done.  I watched as our life in paper went through the copy machine.  There were birth certificates, our marriage certificate, driver’s licenses, social security cards, tax records, shot records for our dogs, the answers to every question about our past asked by the agency, and bunches of papers that we had to sign agreeing with this and granting permission for that.  I then went through the packet of paperwork to make sure everything was there…again.  I think I may have done that ten times before actually handing our hard work over.  I am not sure why.  If something is missing, I can always add it later.  Yet, it was important to me to have it all there and to hand everything over in one big chunk. 

I walked the paperwork in and handed it to the woman at the desk.  I met this woman once before when I came into the agency.  Due to this previous encounter, I knew that she was new.  Do I dare hand over everything about our lives that we have spent so much time compiling to a new employee??  Do I have a choice?  It looked like she was the only one there at the time and I certainly wasn’t going to demand to wait for someone else.  I gave the large manila envelope to her with some hesitation.  But…now… IT IS DONE!!!!!

As excited as I am about this step, it still can’t manage to escape the anxiety that I seem to experience in every step and stage of this process.  We are really doing this…we are really doing this!  I have excitement and anxiety about that.  My anxiety comes from the money, the uncertainty of the unknown, the worry of how our future child will feel about this whole adoption thing.  But, we ARE going to be parents again and we are now closer to that!  I couldn’t be more excited about that!