First Steps

I received a great e-mail from our new social worker today that said:

"Hi Katrina,

Your dossier went out today for the first step of authentication!"

We are so grateful our agency does the authentication process for us as it relieves me of a great deal of stress and worry doing it myself.  They know what they are doing, they have done it a million times, and it will be done correctly.  Big sigh of relief.  The timeline we have from the agency states that this part of the process (fully authenticating the dossier) ought to take from 2-4 weeks to complete.  We can begin our countdown now that it has gone out.  Will you pray with us that we can see it completed in less than four weeks?  Also pray that all documents meet requirements and nothing is sent back to us or rejected along the way.

In other news, the Burris family has been super busy enjoying summer that is rapidly drawing to a close.  For various reasons we have made the prayerful choice to home school Jacob this year.  One of the beautiful things about home school is determining our own schedule.  In order to accommodate an upcoming ten year wedding anniversary trip for Chris and I and also to allow us to be done with school early in May when attention spans are lacking and spring weather is beckoning us outside, we have opted to start school very soon...July 31st will be our first official day!  With that has come a flurry of activity!  We have hit all the major back to school sales, bought some office supplies, and even need to purchase a large bookshelf to accommodate all our school supplies, but with all this, the excitement is building and growing.  I've been on top of things (for now) and even have my lesson plans almost entirely complete up through our Christmas break in December.  We would love it if our early start of school this year also happened to accommodate a two week break for us to travel to China, but I am doubtful that will happen this school year, but we'll be in the swing of things and ready to start early next year in order to prepare for the welcoming of a new little sister! 

Aside from all the school preparations and excitement I have been thrilled to see some growing independence in the twins!  They are now mostly taking themselves to the potty.  You have no idea (no, you really don't have any idea) how giddy and yet sad this makes me all at once.  On one hand, I am so thrilled I am not in the toilet times two all day long (with little 3 year old pea size bladders this can be a lot of time each day), but on the other hand it shows me how much my little people are getting to be big people!  I cannot wait to bring Little One home so we can have the joy of a little person in the home again!  Goodness, this age and stage is exhausting, but seriously so much fun!

So, our "true" summer break is winding down and it seems fitting our dossier is gearing up for DTC.  Wouldn't it be awesome if we could celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary (August 7th) and our second week of school with notification that we are DTC?  That would definitely make for some great celebrating and some fun studying in school!