Hello. I know, I know…long time no post! There’s been a lot going on. Lets see…first of all, Mike and I had our fingerprinting appointment back on 11/14 at 8 am in Hempstead (about 30 minutes away). We overslept (Mike accidentally shut the alarm in his sleep), so the morning started out with a big rush. We didn’t even have time to drop Emily off at Mike’s parents’ house, so we ended up bringing her with us to the appointment in her P.J.s! No biggie. Everything went pretty smoothly. The one thing we learned is that appointment times don’t really mean anything at the Homeland Security office. About 300 other people had the same appointment time as us, but things still moved along pretty quickly (took us about 2 hours from start to finish). They no longer use ink to fingerprint you with. Instead, you place your hands (one at a time) on what looks like a supermarket cashier’s UPC code scanner. It was hot in there (with all the people), so my hands kept sweating, so they kept having to re-scan my fingers. Thank God the woman was patient with me! Mike and I kept getting the same error message when they did our prints “Match warning, match warning”…..No biggie….I guess there are just two serial killer psychos out there in the world who have the same prints as us (hopefully not!).
This week, Emily got sick with a fever and a very yucky, blistery throat (kind of like strep). The doctor said “With a throat that looks that bad, if she doesn’t feel better within 3 or 4 days, she probably has mono.” However, thankfully, she recovered within about 48 hours, so it turned out just to be a regular, yucky virus (no Mono…yay!) My mom was kind enough to come down to Long Island to watch Emily while she was on the mend. I think they both enjoyed their time together.
I came home today for lunch to find blood all over the floor (Ruby the dog was sick). I brought her to the vet, who checked her out and prescribed 10 days of antibiotics and a bland diet of just chicken and rice. Poor Ruby!
Otherwise, no real news on the homefront. Thanksgiving was really nice. It’s hard to believe that it’s almost Christmas….and then shortly after that, my baby girl will be a big girl of 3 years old….Waaaaaaahhhhhh! Hopefully, we will have our approval from immigration/Department of Homeland Security well before then, so we can get our documents to China before the new year. That is the big goal! :)

So, on Saturday I officially turned 30- and what a birthday it was. First off, some of my friends treated me to a morning at the spa (massage and pedicure), which was absolutely WONDERFUL!!!!! Then I came home to a warm birthday welcome from my husband, my parents, my sister, Mike’s parents and brothers, and several close friends. About an hour later, when the mail arrived, Mike and I were both racing to get to the mailbox first. (Of course, Mike let me “win”---it was MY birthday, after all! Heehee!) And when I got there, there was great news inside. We received our fingerprinting appointments for immigration. So we are all set to get fingerprinted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 at 8:00 am. It was great to have our families right there to share the great news with! So, after we get fingerprinted, we will receive our clearance from the government several weeks later, and then all of our documents can go to China!!!! We are almost there!