Email/Mail Magic!

Before the weekend, I sent our adoption caseworker one of those emails that doesn't really need to be sent - wondering if our approval letter had arrived yet from Ontario, and knowing that she would have emailed us if it had. My rationale, based on some superstitious thinking, was that perhaps our letter would show up all of a sudden if I sent her a message. And it did. So, there you have it. Guess today's moral of the story is that acting on superstitious thinking pays off (for those of you who are taking me seriously right now, I'm just kidding). But it was my day today (despite feeling tired and blah about being at work) - after being confused and accidentally showing up 30 minutes late to an Ethics Committee meeting at work (which I can almost never attend), I won a draw for a Starbucks gift card just by being there & putting my name in the box. Then I got a lovely email response from Pizza Pizza, who is sending me a free pizza voucher after I emailed them about my disappointing experience with their new website (LOVE Pizza Pizza). I should likely spend some time entering online contests tonight...or making more customer complaints :) Anyway, I digress...

Now that our provincial approval letter has arrived, the agency can send our dossier off to Ottawa for authentication (the step I kept forgetting about). Typically, the dossier comes back to the agency in 2-4 weeks. Then it is totally ready to go to Ghana.

While I had hoped the dossier would head to Ghana in January, it may still get there in February. And one benefit in waiting for the provincial letter was my discovery of an error or two in our photo pages, which I happened to browse this weekend while sorting all my adoption materials. So, I've sent the corrected pages to the agency & they will arrive this week, in time to go to Ottawa with everything else.

Things are starting to move along, and once our file is in Ghana, we'll officially be waiting for a referral - very much anticipated, and also anxiety-provoking as things start to feel 'real' - but we're getting into final renovation mode (including nursery) now that Christmas is packed away for the year, and I'm enjoying the freedom to focus on life after thesis, so we're feeling good about where things are at!