Have I mentioned....

....that these doctor's letters are the bane of my freaking existence? I went to pick them up - THE VERY LAST DOCUMENTS WAITING TO BE SEALED - from the Secretary of State. I thumbed through them and happened to notice that the seal for Marc's letter was attached to mine the seal for mine was attached to his. You've GOT to be kidding me. Ever get the feeling that someone out there is trying to give you a hint??

I go and show it to the lady at the front desk. She laughs and asks me "Well can you just go and get new copies of these?" "Just" as in "could you just run and climb Mount Everest real quick?" It has taken me SEVEN months and a combined 7 attempts to get these letters done correctly. The last time I went to my doctor's office the secretaries all glared at me - in an obvious kinda way, not a "you're probably just imagining it" way. And my doctor told me "I hope this is good enough because there's not much more I can do other than going to Ethiopia for you."

The look on my face my have blatantly said all that because she said she'd take care of it by carefully taking them apart and putting the staples back in the right spots. You see, if any documents are unstapled they look as if they've been tampered with. A few minutes later she hands them to me. They look like she ripped the staples out with her teeth. I really don't know that this is going to fly, but at this point I can't bear to go through getting new letters. I'm just going to try to pass it off and see what they say.

On another note (this is for you LoriM) I found out that our dossier DOES get mailed to the Iowa office now that we don't have a social worker in our office.

Have I mentioned that either? Evidently our Denver office was not doing enough international adoptions to warrant having a dedicated SW. So they had to let her go. Now the SW in Iowa is handling several states, CO included. On a ballsy (for me) whim I (very politely) told her my opinion: Many agencies out there will put couples on "the list" after their initial application. They're then able to complete home study, training and dossier while they're waiting for a referral. Kinda like serving concurrent sentences. On the other hand, our agency requires you to do home study, training and dossier before you get put on the list. While some people expect the whole process to take 6 months total, our agency is quoting about 2 years at this point. I'm sure that makes it hard for them to get new business.

On the other hand, I definitely appreciate that our agency abides by Hague and is uber-careful about everything.

Anyhoo.... Dossier is complete. Next steps:

• Dossier mailed to Iowa this afternoon
• They review and send to Michigan office
• They review and send to DC to be authenticated
• DC sends it back to Michigan
• Michigan sends it to Ethiopia

Costs:

$15 Secretary of State
$7500 Bethany