Visa Applications

This week I have been working on our visa applications to China.  For some reason this felt like the most stressful thing I have done in this adoption process.  It shouldn't have been that difficult, but I was about to scream my head off a few times!!!  I think the added stress of Christmas right around the corner and my classes I am teaching just intensified the stress.  With adoption papers, you always want to get everything mailed off as soon as possible because you never know how long the wait time is going to be. 

In order to apply for visas, we have to hire a courier to take them into the Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C. (just like we did with our dossier papers) because you can't just mail them in.  As I was trying to decide which courier to use, and reading Holt's instructions, I was getting so confused because they each said something different.  I thought one said that you could hand write the applications, so I did that for all three of ours (Chad, me, my mom) only to find out that they had to be typed.  These are the kinds of papers where everything has to be just right or China might reject them, so I think I quadruple checked everything I did.  We also had to go get another set of passport pictures taken.  Apparently the ones we took 7 months ago were too old.  Good grief. 

I had everything ready to go yesterday, hoping to get to FedEx before the big winter storm hit.  There was one last document that I was waiting on, a formal invitation letter from the Chinese government to show that we had a reason to be in China at that time.  I did not end up receiving that until last night due to the time differences in the work days between here and the west coast.  I was so frustrated that I could not get out of the house to go send them off due to the blizzard.  Chad does not understand that, he thinks there is really no difference between sending them one day versus the next, or even waiting until after Christmas.  He is a little paranoid that they will get lost in the massive amounts of packages and mail going out this week, and it does make you nervous since you are sending your passports with it.  What he doesn't understand is the huge relief I have just getting those things out of my hands and my house so that I don't keep looking at them and stressing over the details.  I keep getting them out and looking over everything again, like the boogie man came in and stole some of my papers during the night.  :)  I am heading out later this afternoon to GET IT DONE.