Apostille Anxiety

I dropped off our dossier this afternoon at the Secretary of State's office so that the documents could be apostilled. I felt like I was leaving one of my kids with a stranger when I handed over that stack of papers to the woman behind the desk. I asked her several questions about how she planned to keep my paperwork safe and I'm pretty sure she thought I was nuts. I was serious, though, because to say those papers are IMPORTANT to me would be the understatement of the millenium. She had an open can of Diet Coke sitting on her desk and she laid all 32 of my documents right beside it. All afternoon I've had visions of a Diet Coke-soaked dossier. Oh well, what can I do? Like so many other aspects of this process, it's out of my control at this point. All I can do is say a little prayer that when I go back on Wednesday to pick it all up, it's there and dry. :)

I realize that not everybody who is reading this blog knows what an apostille even is. A few months ago, I not only did not know what one was, I also didn't know how to pronounce it. In order to adopt from Dana's country, we need to send over a bunch of documents that include details of just about every aspect of our lives-medical statements, financial records, criminal history checks, etc. This is called the dossier. Every document in the dossier needs to be notarized. Then the document must be apostilled. The apostille (pronounced app-uh-steel) is basically a seal that is placed on the document as proof of the authenticity of the notary. I'll post a picture of one of my documents when I (hopefully) get them back on Wednesday so you can see how pretty it looks.

We are still waiting on the final piece of our dossier to arrive. It's called the I-171H and it's the approval from U.S. Immigration for us to parent an adopted child. Once it arrives, I will need to take it downtown and have it apostilled and then I will overnight our entire dossier to Eastern Europe. From there, our facilitation team will translate all our documents and submit them to the government. We will then receive an appointment date and can book our travel to meet Dana.

I'll leave you with a picture I created on Picnik and included in all the thank-you notes I sent to people who have helped in some way with our paperwork (friends who wrote recommendations on our behalf, notary publics, doctor's office staff, etc).