We're still waiting on immigration (the US side of things) and a federal fingerprinting appointments that should be ready in a week or so (hurry up!!!), but we've compiled half our dossier and had it apostilled!
Every single document so far in this process except for one or two (no joke) has had to be redone or re-notarized including our freaking home study. It has been frustrating. Once we get a form back, we notarize it and scan it and email it to our adoption team. Then after it's approved we need to get it apostilled by the state. So I got a sitter to watch my husband who just had surgery a couple weeks ago and my daughter and then took off for LA to get my 19 documents apostilled last Friday. The trip took a total of 8 hours. According to Google maps it *should* have taken two hours one way. TRAFFIC WAS TERRIBLE!!! Highway 101 should be renamed Parking Lot 101. But on the plus side I found a wonderful brown rice and tofu bowl place that also served blueberry banana smoothies. Worth it.
Once apostilled I then scanned them all and sent them to my adoption team again. Thankfully only one of my apostilled documents has to get redone. To apostille something just means that after it's perfect and notarized then I have to get the state of California to stamp it and confirm the notary. I practically cried to the state employee, read her a list of common apostille mistakes (I'm sure she loved me) and then told her how important this was. Poor woman.
So we're going to send off half the documents to U (my son's birth country) and then send the rest when all the people we're waiting on get around to getting back to us. I'd say we're about a month away from being done with it all before waiting for travel dates. It seems to be taking 6-8 weeks lately for people who are totally submitted to get travel dates so now our new timeline is being done with paperwork by Mother's Day and traveling this summer, hopefully in late June or early July. Everything subject to change. As always.
I'm so sick of being paper pregnant and ready to hold this baby boy! Thanks to a wonderful friend (thanks Samantha!) we have a lot of boy clothes and a bouncy seat and a couple of small car seat bases and hopefully soon a crib! I LOVE LOVE LOVE hand-me-downs! Thanks to another friend (thanks Barbara!) we have a great bottle for feeding Roland and access to baby food if he's past the bottle stage. My daughter is talking non stop about her brother nowadays since she was told that after daddy's surgery we'd be gearing up to see him. Little did we know a few things would go wrong in our paperwork game so that we'd still be collecting stuff at this late date. (State police clearances are our fault, but there are a bunch of other things that are just plain not our fault and we just have to wait.) But we're ready and working hard. Almost there.
Want baby. Now.
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