Feeling GREEN....finally!!

Yes, it is true. We finally got our green cards for the USA. It was a crazy, long, expensive, hard, annoying process. (fyi-apparently I say process wrong here in the USA. I say pro-cess not praaacess...weird!)
Anyway our immigration journey was a crazy one. I was on my parents papers when I was a child and aged off them. Then I got married which then made my husband my immediate family and kinda removed me from my parents..to a degree.(which makes the process longer) So my dear parents, little brother recieved their papers in about 1994ish. They followed my brother to Utah where he lived with his wife. My husband also has a brother and sister who lived in Utah with thier spouses. We wanted to follow but couldn't. So began the wait. I had to wait 5 years for my Mom to be a new immigrant then she could apply for citizenship. Once she had citizenship she could finally apply for me.(If I wasn't married she could have applied earlier...gov't stops many people from getting married I'd guess) So that took about a year to get all her paperwork worked out. Then finally my papers went in about Aug.2001. Then the wait came. When we started people's wait time was about 4 years in our catagory. Not bad we thought. So we kinda planned on about 4 years. That was a joke. The wait times just got longer and longer. Finally Aug.2010 we could start sending in the final visa papers. Each person in our family needed a thick stack of papers filled out. Truckloads of documents when there was 6 of us. We had to go to doctor's appointments, fingerprinting and the final interview. It was stressful. You hear horror stories of people's paperwork tossed because they are missing info. My husband was like a crazy man checking and rechecking them. And when we got to the interview we still had a problem...typical. They wouldn't except his birth certificate because it was a small one. They want one with his parents on it and full info. And after 17 years of marriage we found out that the certicate that we had for marrige was a church one not a "real" one. I was blown away. I am sure that is what I used to change my name and proved we were married in Canada. Well the immigration would not take it. So I was approved for a green card and so were the kids. But my dear hubby now had to prove that he was married to me. Haha!!
I had visions of my marriage not being registered and having to face that we in the eyes of the law have been *gasp* living together for 17 years!! But luckily that didn't happen. Apparently my husband still loves me and sent away to Washington state and got our marriage certificate. He also sent away for a new Canadian birth certificate. Boy they are fancy and I think they have fixed any prolems with fakes cause they are just amazing. Clear parts, holograms, plastic-y weird paper. Very cool.Oops sorry got off topic there!
So about a week later -Green cards came in the mail. Only took over 9 years from when our papers went in. Only over 16 since my parents came. Crazy!
All this time waiting...it's hard to believe that they are here. It's hard to know what we will do now. We finally are here when the economy tanks. Mortgages are hard to get. Jobs are really hard to get. But we are happy and know we should be here. Utah is home but we still miss our other home, Beautiful British Columbia.
To all my BC friend -please continue to complain about the rain frequently...it really helps me not miss there.