Hi Silas. This is from your sisters. We are waiting for you and we love you! I love you. Come home. Come home quickly Silas! Silas, we are getting your room ready, I bet you will like it. Love, Madelyn

I love you. Caroline wants to send you a kiss and hugs. Love, Caroline

After we got our form last Tuesday, we were on a mission to get our dossier done! Jason took our last couple forms to be notarized to our wonderful neighbor's house Wednesday morning at 7:00 am! Caroline & I dropped Madelyn off at school and then took off. We went to the Fayette Co. clerks office and had everything county certified. Then we went to Frankfort to the capitol to have everything state certified. We then had to run by the Franklin Co. clerk's office to have a couple things certified there and then to the vital statistics office. There, I was told the wait was one hour so we had to come back to Lexington and get Madelyn from school. We then went straight back to Frankfort, picked up our form at vital statistics and then headed back to the capitol to finish up things there. Whew! It was a very long but very productive day. Our dossier was sent to D.C. on Friday. It has to be authenticated and then we can send it to China! Because of the holiday tomorrow, it might be next week before we get it sent, but we are almost there. After that, it is completely out of our hands and lies in the hands of China.

Please pray for things to continue to move quickly and smoothly for us. Chinese new year is in February so that will probably set us back some because we have heard they close down for like a month. Why don't we have any holidays like that??? Also, please pray for our financial situation. Things have progressed so quickly that we are not prepared for all the fees due. We thought it would take longer but we are happy things are moving along. We know God will provide for our needs but ask for prayers for this.

We love you Silas and cannot wait for you to be in our arms. God planned for us to be your family before time began and we cannot wait to have you home.

Today we had the most wonderful surprise in the mail! It was our I-797C form for the USCIS (U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services). This is huge! It takes most people 45 - 60 days to receive this form. It took us about a week :). God is so good and he is answering our prayers so quickly and so faithfully with our adoption!

I had sent a letter with our homestudy stating that we already had our referral and PA, could they please process our request as soon as possible. I prayed for the person who received our packet that they would be moved to help us - it worked! Now I have to get busy finishing our dossier. We have all the paperwork for it, but now it has to be county certified, state certified and then our agency will send it to D.C. for the embassy authentication. We also need to take some pictures to include.

We'll be there soon Silas! Much sooner than we originally anticipated. I was praying for June, thinking that was a long shot, but now it could be even earlier!

Today we got some awesome news from our adoption agency. Our family advocate called to tell me we received our prior approval (PA) from the Chinese government! Basically this states that we have been "pre-approved" to adopt Silas and that he is ours! Now if we can just get our government to cooperate as quickly we might get our little guy home soon!

When our dossier is ready to be sent, we'll include the PA on the front. Our adovcate said they usually process the ones with the PA faster since we were already pre-approved. I was not expecting the PA until at least February so we are really excited to have already received it. Our homestudy is being sent to the USCIS hopefully either tomorrow or Monday. I included a letter to the office stating we had already received our PA and that Silas had special needs. I also included his picture and asked that they process the info as quickly as possible, we'll see! Hopefully when they see his precious face, they will want to help us out.

We can also send Silas a care package now. We are going to have fun putting that together and mailing it to him! What a great start to 2008! Happy 16th month birthday Silas!

Well, we're getting a little closer... Today we had a great start to 2008! Our wonderful social worker sent us a draft of our home study. We reviewed it for errors and then e-mailed her a couple spelling changes. She will make the final revisions and then send it to her surpervisor. We are leaving Friday for Florida and asked her if there would be any way we could have the final copy by then to get notarized and sent to the government. It would be a great way to start vacation! Please pray for us to be able to send the home study before we leave on Friday. We'll keep you updated.