We just received our "two pink lines" in the form of an email:
Ladies, Please let your families know the following dossiers are on their
way to Ethiopia:
Brown, Marc & Kellie (it went with 4 other Bethany dossiers)
If I'm understanding the bill I just received, it is for courier service to and from DC, then to Ethiopia. Hopefully that means it's actually been sent to DC. Hopefully that means it will be on its way to Ethiopia in the next two weeks. Hopefully...
Costs: $400
Dossier arrived in Iowa, and passed the new SW's inspection. (yay!) She sent it overnight to the Michigan (HQ) office yesterday, so it should have arrived today. I'm hoping that they have time to review it today and overnight it to DC so that they can start on it (or at least put it in their pile) on Monday.
....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:
Costs:
$15 Secretary of State
$7500 Bethany
I got a resume from a guy once that said "Bill Smith, Reproduction Specialist". I nearly fell out of my chair laughing when I saw that he actually worked for Xerox.
Anyhoo...I remembered that because I just made 87,000 copies of our dossier.
Final forms are at the Secretary of State's office waiting to be sealed. I'll pick them up tomorrow over lunch, copy and add them to the rest of the dossier, then off to our agency they go. I know it's just another small step and all, but I kinda have a goofy grin on my face. Now is the time when I can just sit back and wait and find other ways to drive myself crazy.
Ahhhhh....
Our new and improved I-171 h is in the building. Plan of attack:
Monday:
I wish I had something exciting to share, but we're still just waiting on our I 171h. I've heard that a number of people in the Denver / Boulder area got theirs back in about 5 weeks, so I've started checking the mail with greater anticipation over the past week. But nothing yet.
Other than that, I have to pick up a copy of our marriage certificate and we should have all of our dossier documents together. Then we get them sealed and we're all set.
So that's about it - exciting, huh?
I felt like we were trapped in that Simpson's episode yesterday. The one where they keep going, "YAAAY!.... Boooo...... YAY!!!.... BOOOO... Yaaaaay!..... BOO!"
20 minutes later we get to CBI, explain what we're doing, fill out a form and they say it will take 3 - 5 days to get it back (yay? boo? I don't even know at this point). I hand the lady an example letter that came with our dossier paperwork of what we need the letter to say. She blows us off "We have our own letter we use." I try to explain that Ethiopia (our agency? who knows?) has very specific wording that they want and could I please just attach this to my request so they know what I want? "No, our letter is professional and includes much more information that this. We know what we're doing." (boo hoo hoo) We leave, downtrodden, exhausted... Costs: $30Luckily for me, I have the sweetest friend in the world who is also adopting and happens to work in NYC, so I am mailing the birth cert and letter to her and she's going to get the authentication and seal for us. (yay yay yay yay yay yay YAY!!!) I can't even tell you what a load that is off my mind. Otherwise we could be waiting 3 more months for these document.
A few minutes later I got another good outstanding work-related call (YAY!) and decided to press my luck by checking the mail. In it I found................. drum roll please ......
.....
.....
...my sealed birth certificate. (Yaaaaaay) It's hard to know whether you're happy or sad or just exhausted after a day like this. Either way, this was the only appropriate thing to do:
The NYC department of vital statistics has my head spinning right round this afternoon. Who knew that the hardest part of adopting would be getting a birth certificate!? Correction - *sealed* birth certificate....because I certainly have enough copies of our birth certificates by now. I'm going to be able to wall paper our living room with them soon.
After being transferred and being told to call different numbers EIGHT times, I finally got to a lady who could tell me how to get a sealed copy. They make it very easy for you (note the sarcasm there...). If you were born in New York, in one of the 5 boroughs, take note:
1st, you have to request a long form birth certificate with a letter of exemplification from the Department of Health. 212.788.4500.
2nd, you get that, then mail it allllll the way back to NY to the NY County Clerk where they will verify the signature on the letter. 646.386.5932.
3rd, you get that back, then mail it all the way back to NY again to the NY State Department of State, Certification Unit. 212.417.5747.
Well that was easy! (banging head against wall) Would it be quicker / easier / cheaper for me to fly there and courier the request around the city myself?
grumble grumble grumble....
Costs: $33.00
Do you have Paula Abdul stuck in your head now? :) Me too!
I am happy to say that we had our last home visit last night. Our SW came over to do the follow up on our home safety inspection and to meet Fletcher. HSI went well, no biggie there. Fletch was, well, Fletch. He wanted to show the SW all of his books. Then as she and I tried to leave his room to go chat, he pushed me out the door and told her "Get in here now!" Oy vey! It was cute because he wanted her all to himself to play, but my goodness, he sounded like a two year old tyrant. And we never say "get in here now" to him - where did that come from?!?! Oh well...I'm sure we're not the worst parents she's ever seen.
So she is finishing her home study write up this week, then we're waiting on medical letters and Fletcher's doctor's appt (this Friday) and we're DONE with the home study. We should be able to review it next week and get it in the mail.
Our minor setbacks were:
Jackie's dr. letter is in the mail to us. Fletcher's dr. appt. is on Friday. My dr. forms are in the mail to us. We're cruisin'!
Costs: $20 for state seal
Well I'm not from Texas, but if I was I probably would have yelled that at the bank today.
Of all things you don't want to do while in the adoption process, buying a house is probably at the top of the list. And we weren't really planning on buying a new house. We just happened to see one in a great location. For a great price. So we thought maybe we'd take a look. Which led to me yelling at the 12 year old kid at the bank because he was more interested in flirting with the teller and slacking off than helping me with a home loan. I *may* have told him I would go somewhere else if I was inconveniencing him. But come on, I get three letters a week from this bank telling me I'm a preferred customer and all the wonderful things they can do for me. Now I try to call in a favor and I get this. Anyway... I'm sure I'm not the first or last woman to yell at him. Call it training for marriage.
The nice thing about looking into home loans when you're adopting is that you actually have MORE paperwork than the bank could ever want. This is how the conversation went:
Bank lady: I'll need your 2007 W2's.
Me: Here, I have my W2's from 2007 as well as my state and federal tax returns. Would you like 2004, 2005 and 2006 as well?
BL: Um, no. How about paycheck stubs?
Me: Sure, and here are some notarized letters from our employers verifying length of employment and income. You know...in case that will help.
BL: Do you have any stocks, bonds, other assets?
Me: (clunking down a one inch stack of statements from stocks, 2 mutual fund accounts, 401k, 403b, 529b, 2 life insurance policies) Yes, I think I might have a few.
Well you get the picture. I wanted to say "Don't test me lady. I'm the QUEEN of paperwork!"
And while I was there (you know, since I had already scared all of the teenagers working there) I thought hmm....I might as well get the "financial statement" for my dossier. I won't even go into that story. But at least it's d-o-n-e!! And I seem to remember apologizing and promising to bake them cookies or something.
Last night Marc picked up his letter and forms from his doctor. My doctor called today so that I could read him the results of my TB test (self service - nice) and I appear to be fine, so he's mailing my forms for that. And my dear friend Pam delivered the sweetest letter of recommendation to me last night over girl talk, grilled cheese and fries. What could be better!?
I had my doctor's appointment yesterday and got all sorts of items accomplished:
HIV Test - check
TB Test - ouch, er, I mean, check
Drug Screen - check
Doctor's letter - check
I completely heart my doctor. I see my OB who delivered Fletcher because, well, I'm never really sick (except for the perpetual cold) so I don't have a GP that I go to. Anyway, my OB has got to be about 80 years old - and I'm not even kidding. My favorite nurse in his office (who doesn't look a day over 50) told me once that she had been working with him for 40 years. And I know he did other medical work and was also an army doctor before this. He's so old that he actually hand wrote the letter for me. He doesn't even have a computer in his office! But he is just the sweetest, most caring man you'll ever meet...the kind of guy I'd pick for a grandpa (If I didn't already have my own awesome grandpa that is).
Today I'm picking up one of our Letters of Recommendation from a friend and tomorrow Marc picks up his doctor's letter.
I've gotten a lot of dossier stuff done as well, although I can't go too fast because we don't want it to be outdated. Honestly, the dossier is a lot easier than I thought.
We're moving along...
...One giant leap for our home study!
We found out today that both of our FBI background checks came back on Friday and, as I suspected, we're relatively upstanding citizens. Sweet! And, we finished 14 hours of training time this weekend.
Check and CHECK! That's the sound of my home study list getting shorter. To finish our home study we're now waiting on:
We're "this close" to being done with this phase of the process and have started gathering (well, ordering at least) documents for our dossier. I think I'm eager to get the home study finished so that I can feel like I've completed or accomplished something, even thought it's just one step...
So we get the question "Any news yet?" a lot. Unfortunately it's going to be a loooooooooong long long time before we have any real news. Right now we are still in the paperwork phase. This will probably last through spring. We hope to have our dossier on its way to Ethiopia by the beginning of the summer. Once the paperwork gets to Ethiopia, then we start waiting. This could be 6 to 18 months, maybe more, we just don't know.
Until then, I will bore you with the very minute details and triumphs... :)
Marc's fingerprints came back yesterday! Whohoooo! Now we have both received CBI and are waiting on FBI. Our social worker says they usually run about two weeks behind CBI. This is excellent news because we expected to be waiting until the end of April to receive these.
For our Dossier (mountain #2 of paperwork) I have ordered our birth and marriage certificates, but have only about 10% confidence that the birth certificates are going to be correct. The lady laughed when I told her that they "must be certified and sealed with the Great Seal of the State" (I really need to get triumphant sounding music to play when I said "Great Seal of the State".). She said she didn't know what that meant, but she'd send me a certified copy with a seal on it. We shall see...
The costs are starting to pile up in little bits and pieces (especially if these are the wrong birth certificates).
Birth Certs for Kellie $36
Birth Certs for Marc $35.50
Marriage Certs $33
Marc's copay for dr. appt $25
Kellie's copay for dr. appt $25
Total: $154.50
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