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Here is the latest on our adoption journey.

Things are moving along. This week I have mailed our application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition to US Immigration along with our Home Study and another set of fingerprint cards to the FBI requesting a copy of our Identification Records. Once Immigration receives and reviews our application they will notify us when to go for additional fingerprinting. This should be our last time having to be fingerprinted. In total fingerprinting had to be done 3 times or in my case 5 times because twice my fingerprints were not clear enough to be checked.

The next step in our journey is working on our Dossier. The dossier is a collection of documents (about 20) which is our official application to the country’s Consulate for the adoption of the child. Most of these documents need to be notarized and/or appostilled (document issued by the Secretary of State certifying notarial authority for our notarized documents.) Once all this paperwork is completed we submit it to our adoption agency for review and if all ok then gets submitted to country’s embassy and consulate in New York. Once the consulate approves the dossier it gets registered with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education.

Since the New York Embassy is backlogged, our dossier will need to be submitted to the Embassy in Washington. The downside to this is that they will only accept one dossier a month. At this point ours is slated to be submitted in May providing the couples ahead of us have no delays. We also have to keep in mind that all this paperwork can’t be more than 4 months old at the time of submission. If it turns out that there is paperwork that is more than 4 months old it will need to be redone.

Next entry the child’s bedroom.