Another five card on it's way

Have you ever heard anyone call fingerprints a "five card"? I know I have heard it somewhere...maybe The First 48 or Forensic Files or some other morbid show that I watch. Anyway...our fingerprints for immigration are "EXPIRING" again and I just made this sorry realization. As some of you may know, our immigration approval is like gold in our adoption paperwork and it takes a ton of work and lots of time to get it from USCIS (and the Dept. of Homeland Security). It comes in 2 parts - the fingerprinting that Jeff and I have to do to assure that we are not criminals evading the law and the homestudy/application where we have to have every part of our lives scrutinized with a magnifying glass by someone who probably beat their kids in Wal-Mart the night before (that is really a joke). The fingerprint portion is only good for 15 months and the application portion is good for 18 months so now we are embarking upon our 3rd (as in 1-2-3) renewal of our fingerprints. The sad part is that this costs $160 every time and requires Jeff to take off work for a day and me to have to dance my way out of school or clinical.

Enough complaining. I discovered just this morning that our fingerprints expire TOMORROW so I had to scramble around looking for a few pieces of very important paperwork to copy, write a nice but frustrated letter and run to the post office to try to get out our request. Hopefully we will have this 3rd renewal behind us soon and maybe there will be just one more before we travel to China. Of course in a few months, it will be time to update that home study again so get out the magnifying glasses.