Homestudies and Fingerprints and Paperchases....Oh My!

It has been a busy couple of weeks since we last posted, but a lot has been accomplished in those couple of weeks. This past Thursday we had our homestudy with our social worker Teresa and it went very well. She talked with the boys for a little bit about being big brothers and having a little sister and they did really well. When asked, Brendan forgot what country his baby sister would be coming from and then when we reminded him that it was Vietnam he said "oh yeah, it's near China and England." He was a just a little bit off in his geography with England. But overall the homestudy went well and this weekend we received our rough draft copy from Teresa to review and make any necessary changes and once we send it back she will send us the final copy for our approval.

We also got notice that our I-600A was approved and we went to get fingerprinted on Friday. That was an interesting experience. They don't do it the old fashioned way anymore by rubbing your fingers in black ink. They have gone high tech buy using what looks like a copy machine that scans your fingers and the prints appear on a computer screen. While I was having mine done I could hear Andy asking the lady doing his prints a tone of questions about how the whole computer process worked and what all of the numbers meant (engineers!).

Now on to the paperchase. After reading this paragraph you will know why they call this part of the adoption the paperchase. All along we have been collecting, filling out and making copies of required forms that we need for the adoption. Today we dropped off about a dozen of those forms to have notarized. Most of them are required for our dossier. All of this papers travel to many different places. Once they are all notarized, some of them have to go on to be certified at the state level, then they need to be authenticated by the Embassy or Consulate of Vietnam. Once the papers are all authenticated, they are sent to Hanoi where they are translated. This part apparently takes a couple weeks, but once it is complete we will be ready for our referral!(that means a child is chosen for us).

I also received my passport in the mail this week and Andy doesn't have to have his renewed until next year, so we're ready to travel!

The main things left for us to do is keep up with all of our paperwork for the dossier. There will be a constant stream of papers coming in that will have to go through the above process. Our goal is to have our entire dossier completed and submitted by sometime next month. Kathleen seems to be at about the same place in her process as well so it's still looking good for us to go over together.

I have added a website under favorite links called World Fact Book - Vietnam. It has a lot of good information about the country for anyone who is interested.

We'll post again soon!

Moving Right Along.....

In the past couple of weeks Andy and I have both had our physicals from our doctors that we need for both our homestudy and our adoption agency. Today I mailed out the remainder of our paperwork to our social worker for our homestudy. The next step will be our social worker coming to our home for our homestudy visit. About a week and a half ago we also mailed out our I-600A form to begin processing. After we get that processed we will need to go downtown to be fingerprinted.