What We Have Left

I didn't write a post before I went to bed last night, and I'm feeling very uninspired today (and am quickly running out of time before I have to go get the older 2 from school), so I thought I'd give you a quick summary of what we have left as far as paperchasing for our adoption goes. We're currently working on compiling a dossier, which we will send to our daughter's country for the Department of Adoptions to look at (to allow us to get an appointment to see files of potential children), and then the judge will look at (to help determine if we can adopt our daughter). We've gotten most of the paperwork together, but there are a few things left.

1. Medical forms and a doctor's license for both of us. We need to go to the county health department and get a couple of blood tests, then go to the doctor (hopefully they'll let us come for a regular office visit) and get her to fill out the forms for us. We needed a physical in Sept for our insurance, so they won't pay for another one now. We also got the bloodwork done while we were at it, since we knew we would need it, but since it'll be more than 6 months old when we submit our dossier we need to do it again. Hopefully by going to the health dept for the bloodwork we'll be able to get the doctor to fill out our forms while we're there for the office visit (rather than waiting on blood test results) and we can make sure they're done immediately and right the first time. A lot of people have problems with this form, but our doctor has a notary on staff and is familiar with international adoptions (though not necessarily from our daughter's country), so hopefully it will be easy for us.

2. State police clearances for both of us. We have to go get our fingerprints taken and fill out a form so they can do a background check on us. Since we're in the state capital we should be able to walk in and do it all in one place and drive back to that place a few days or a week later for the forms, rather than waiting a few weeks turn-around mailing it all in. At least I hope.

3. Jacob's employment letter. This one I'm a little worried about. There's a way to get one, but it's through a process, not a person, and I have a feeling it's not going to be notarized when it comes, which won't work. In that case we'll have to ask his boss to fill one out for us, which Jacob doesn't want to do. We'll see. Hopefully the letter we get will be good enough, because if it isn't we'll have to submit our taxes as well, and I have no idea when they're going to be done. Ugh.

4. Letters of obligation. These are forms saying we'll comply with our daughter's birth country's post-adoption requirements, like filing reports and telling them if we move. We actually already filled these out once, but the notary date was wrong on one, so we need to re-do it.

5. Permission to let our daughter's country put our data on computer. This is also a pretty simple form, but it's new so I forgot it when we went and signed the huge stack of papers at the notary.

6. Jacob's name declaration page. This is a form stating that all versions of his name that might be on other forms (with or without his middle name, etc) are him. I'm pretty sure he did this one once, but I couldn't find it in the huge stack of papers later, so he needs to do it again.

7. Our I171-H. This is approval from the US government to adopt a foreign orphan. We sent the paperwork off for this, now we just need to get our fingerprints done (this is a separate set of fingerprints from the ones for state police clearances) and wait for them to send us the form.

Then we have to get these papers plus two more (that I forgot the first time) apostilled, which is just a fancy way of saying the secretary of state attaches a paper saying the person who notarized the form is, in fact, a valid notary.

After that we're pretty much done with our part of the process. We ship it all off to our daughter's country and wait. They'll (hopefully) accept it, and issue us a travel date to come and accept our daughter's file and then meet her! Hopefully that will happen in about 3 months. Some days it seems so far away, and other days it feels so close (just 3 months and I can finally give her a hug!). I can't wait!