NEED ONE MORE THING!

It turns out the CCAI didn't still have our original doctor's clearance letter so we would need to get a new one from the doctor.

Until we get that turned in our 9-11 day count will not officially be started.

So I immediately made a call to the Dr.'s office. (Wed.)

I didn't hear back, so I called again (Thursday) and explained how we hated to pressure them into getting this done but could we PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE GET THIS DONE ASAP!

The Doctor's called first thing Friday morning and it was done and I could pick it up! Yeah!
I was just leaving for work so I stopped by the doctor's, grabbed the letter, called my boss and asked if it would be ok if I was a little late so I could deliver the letter to the agency. Yeah! I was good to go! I'm so thankful they are so understanding at work! And I only ended up being a 1/2 hour late for work!

BACK FROM THE CONSULATE !

Our "authenticated" paperwork actually came back right before we left for our trip home for Thanksgiving. So we made plans to turn it all in to CCAI as soon as we got back. (We wanted to change our pictures that were to go to China to be more recent anyway and since we were going home we knew we would be able to get lots with our Family at Thanksgiving!) We landed 11/27 at night.

So on 11/28 we turned our paperwork in to CCAI for CRITICAL REVIEW!

They look the entire packet over 3 seperate times to make sure everything is done correctly. They commit to having it completed in 9-11 days.

HOME FOR THANKSGIVING

I still have lots more catching up to do on this blog. We went home for Thanksgiving and got to see lots of family members and do alot of catching up.

We were surprised with gifts of quilt squares (which I need to photo and add to the blog) and some great advice about how to proceed with the quilt.

NOVEMBER 1ST RUN AROUND

Luckily my boss and co-workers are very understanding. As we had to get this sent off ASAP as soon as my meeting was over I took off on my trek. My work understood that I might be a little bit late due to the distances I had to drive and the waiting I might run into at each of the locations I had to go to. Here is a list of my trek that I did all in one day!

1st: to a copy store
2nd: to a notary to notarize it as a copy
3rd: to the county clerk to verify the notary was actually a notary of that county and put their mark on it.
4th: to the secretary of state to verify the county clerk's mark was actually that of the county clerk
5th: to the copy store again to make copies of all the documents going out to the consulate (60+ pages in our case!)
6th: to the post office to send it all off to the consulate!

And then we just got to sit back and cross our fingers! We discovered that due to the lateness of our I-797 getting back to us there was a little bit of a worry about a couple of our documents. We had been told the consulate would only authenticate (or put their seal on) documents that were within a 6 month period. Our Doctors letters and our police clearance letters had both been done in May! It was now November! We were holding our breath to find out if we were going to have to redo these! November 1st was the day our documents were shipped overnight to the consulate and the first 2 documents to pass their six month mark were our police clearance letters: their six months would be up on November 3rd!