Ready for Authentication

My mom, the boys, and I have driven all over Alabama this week.  Sunday, the boys and I drove the girls to camp Maywood.
Monday, Mom, the boys and I drove to the Morgan County Courthouse to have all of our Morgan county paperwork county certified.  Then off to Athens b/c I had one paper that was signed by a notary from Limestone Co.
Tuesday we drove up to Madison Co. courthouse because one of our notaries had signed the paper in Morgan Co. but had their notary in Madison Co.   If I had known that, I would have gone to Madison on Monday also.
On the way home, we stopped by a used homeschool curriculum store in Madison and got the Seth's curriculum for the year.
I finally had all of our Alabama paperwork county certified except for our home study, whose notary happens to be in Shelby Co.  Rather than drag this out 2 weeks with mailing here and there, I decided to bite the bullet and just go do it in person.
So, Wednesday, Mom, the boys and I drove to Shelby Co. to have our homestudy notary county certified, then off to Montgomery to have all of our Alabama documents State Certified. That whole ordeal Wednesday took about 7.5 hrs.  It  has been a long 4 days of driving all over.
I also mailed off our TN and IN papers to get state certified and have those back already.  All of our dossier papers are now ready to be sent to various Chinese consulate offices to be authenticated.  Which means, our 10 pages from Alabama will be going to Houston, my Birth Certificate from Indiana will have to go to Chicago, and Aaron's birth certificate and our marriage license from TN will go to DC.  Crazy.
I was excited to send them off, then found out the Houston courier I was going to use is taking a vacation next week, so they won't be taking papers to the consulate until 8/12. Oh well, I am glad to have those papers finished with county and state certifications.  Now I just to have make copies of everything, fill out some papers pay some money, of course, and send them off.
We haven't gotten any money yet from grants.  So far, all we have heard is that they have received all of our paperwork.  I have applied to 8 different grant agencies. I plan to apply for more, but getting our dossier paperwork done was more important.
Our travel date to China should be sometime between November and February.  I am so ready to go!