Our dossier is on its way!


I dropped it it off last night a few minutes before the store closed. So far, it's gone...a few miles. Lol! It's supposed to arrive on Tuesday though! I thought once I sent it off, I would be done. But this morning I received an email saying that effective immediately, we needed to wire $500 to our facilitators at the same time we sent our dossier! So, tomorrow morning we're off to the bank. There's been a flurry of changes in Ukraine's adoption process, and I am hoping and praying that there will be NO MORE changes until after we are safely submitted!

A lot of work and stress went into that pile of paper, especially in the last few weeks. Some documents had to be redone 3 or 4 times, including a last-minute homestudy rewrite. We very nearly didn't get the redone homestudy in time, but our social worker "happened" to find an extra signature sheet. It was an intense day - I was waiting for an email from the SW telling me if I could come get our homestudy, or if we'd have to wait several more days. Brennan and I had to leave in the afternoon, and I still hadn't gotten the email before we left. At 4p I couldn't stand it anymore and I called Ken and had him check my email - and our homestudy was done! We left our friend's house and had the homestudy in hand 30 minutes later! I couldn't believe how everything came together at the last minute. I shouldn't have wasted so much time worrying about it :).

It's nervewracking and relieving to have the dossier gone. Now all I can do is wait *patiently* until we are submitted. Hopefully, prayerfully, it won't be long until I am holding my little boy!

So close I can taste it

We're almost there. We have almost all the paperwork done; we even have our "golden ticket" (immigration)! We would have had everything done, but things keep needing to be redone. I planned for this, I scheduled time for delays. I just did not schedule for all the delays to be at the last minute!! I almost lost it the other day when I received an email that sad, "I'm sorry, but x, y, and z need to be redone." Brennan and I spent an hour in the doctor's office a few days ago, waiting for documents to be redone. I didn't have any toys or food with me, but B still did great! Now, that same document needs to be redone. Again. This time I am going to drop it off with an envelope and say, get this done and in the mail by Tuesday. And hopefully that will be that.
There's another document we need to redo because Ukraine changed how they want it done, but that one only needs to be notarized. We're waiting on our revised homestudy to come in the mail, and then I should be able to get everything apostilled by the end of next week! Once we get our apostilles approved, then we will be sending our dossier overseas!
One of the things that has been slowing us down is that we need to scan everything and send it to one of our Ukranian team members for approval. She often takes two days to get back to us, so if a document needs to be redone, it takes two days to find that out, a day or two to get it redone, and then another two days to find out if it's approved. So that really can hold up our process. All of our apostilles had better be approved, because they are $5 a piece! We are set to be submitted on Februrary 10, as long as we can get our paperwork over there in time. This is the first date that we can be submitted after Ukraine reopens after its winter break. I'm REALLY hoping that we will be submitted that day. It would mean a travel date somewhere around the end of March!