Starts and Stops in Paperwork

The incredible levels of paperwork and hoops needed for an international adoption continue to astound me. It’s amazing so many international adoptions are ever completed! ;-D We have completed three domestic adoptions. No comparison!!

Now that the Immigration paperwork (called an I800A) is off (just received acknowledgement on day 15), we are hard at work compiling the Dossier. When 3 of 11 documents sent to our state’s capital were rejected, we got a crash course in how notaries are supposed to notarize documents. :-} The corrected documents were sent again, and arrived a few days later. I then zeroxed, compiled, and sent 12 documents to the US Dept of State in Washington, DC for authentication on 3/25/09. Then they’ll (hopefully) be forwarded over to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC for authentication by them. Then back to us, so we can send them to our adoption agency and be certain they’re ready and in compliance for travel to China. They can’t actually travel to China UNTIL we get the proper piece of paper from Immigration (and then notarize it, certify it and doubly authenticate it also!). And we can’t get that proper piece of paper until we get fingerprinted in our state’s capital. And we can’t go get fingerprinted until Immigration makes an appointment for us. More hoops!

I estimate we have now filled out some 165 pages, and zeroxed another 263 pages! The postman at our local post office now knows me by sight :-}, and is rooting for the adoption too ;-D (he commented I was in there an awful lots these days!). We have lots more pages to go yet.

And so we persist as rapidly and accurately as we can… PTL we have an adoption agency that helps us so much!