bide

Remember when I said we're just in the waiting stage of the adoption? Well, that wasn't quite true--we didn't have our dossier completed, so nothing was actually in Russia yet. I thought we'd have everything wrapped up quickly, so the semantics weren't critical.


Well, I'm here to come clean: we still don't have anything in Russia yet.


I'm discouraged right now, but some of that is my own fault: I thought we'd be farther along, but 'real life' keeps getting in the way. We just received our dossier to print out, notarize, apostille and send back to our agency. There are a couple of things I didn't realize, which is costly (either time or money), like we need a certified copy of our marriage certificate, and this, too, is discouraging.


Here's a positive though: we may not have to worry about winter in Russia.


A couple more things to enhance your education:

• This blog does a great job of summarizing what happens on the trips to Russia. Especially check out the order of events she lists for the first trip.
• To apostille something is to get the notarized item notarized again (basically). So all our documents get signed and notarized here in Burlington, then sent off to Madison to get notarized (apostilled) by the Secretary of State.
• The region we're sending documents to is Krasnoyarsk. This is about 4,000 miles from Moscow (where we have to go to first on our second trip... yikes).