Out of Our Hands

Today is the day that the paperwork portion of the adoption process is finally over. We just sent our completed dossier to a courier service in Washington DC. It is cleverly named The Assistant Stork because they help adoptive families by delivering adoption paperwork to various places in DC. They will first take our dossier to the State Department and wait while each document is authenticated. Then they will drop off the dossier at the Ethiopian Embassy so that everything can be authenticated again. I guess that can take a couple of days, depending on how backed up things are at the Embassy. Once all of that is done, they will send the dossier to our agency, and from there it will be sent off to Ethiopia.

Having the dossier submitted means that we will officially be on the waiting list to receive our referral. Right now, it looks like we will be at #11 for our agency. Several of the families ahead of us on the list want a child of a specific gender (we are open to either gender) and some of them are requesting children in a different age range (ours is 0-3). Most are only adopting one child, but at least three families are adopting two. Because of all these factors, it is hard to guess when we can expect a referral. We are just glad to have all of the paperwork behind us. And now we wait.

Making Progress

Our paperwork is currently being authenticated in Austin! Hopefully we will have it back sometime next week. After that, it will be time to send it off with a courier to go to D.C. and then to Africa! It is almost officially out of our hands. The internet (and our adoption agency) tell us from the time we send off our dossier to the time we are home with kids is 6 to 16 months. This seems really soon (kids in March?!?!) or really far away (we still have over a year to wait!?!?). Hopefully it will be somewhere in the middle. 

In other news, we have started name hunting. If you have any good ideas, post 'em!

Notarizing Nightmare

You wouldn't think getting things notarized would be that big of a deal. Especially when it is at the bank where you have your money...a place where you've even gotten things notarized in the past. And you would be wrong. It turns out that our bank has some kind of "policy" that prohibits them from notarizing personal documents. But isn't pretty much anything anyone would ever get notarized personal, at least to that person. Maybe it was just a woman on a power trip, but needless to say, if they didn't give us such a good interest rate, I think we would be moving our money elsewhere.

And the first place we would think about moving it is to the bank where we DID get our documents notarized. Turns out the notary there didn't think notarizing our 8 documents was a big deal. She was even excited for us and the fact that we are adopting. And we got it all taken care of Saturday morning, allowing us to have a relaxing weekend without worrying where we were going to find a nice notary.

So the bad news is that some people at our bank aren't very helpful. But the good news is that there are other nice people willing to notarize our documents. We just sent off copies of everything, all 33 pages of our dossier, to our agency for them to review. Once we get their okay, we will just need to get 2 of the documents certified at the Texas Secretary of State office in Austin, and then the whole thing will be off to Washington D.C. and then Ethiopia. We are one step closer.