waiting to wait

By my count, there are only two remaining pieces of our dossier to be handed in. One is our budget worksheet which has to be notarized, and the other is our I-171H from CIS. The first one will come quickly. We just have to get the form from KBS Dossiers in the mail, notarize, and send back. The other, well who knows when that is going to happen. Our homestudy has been sent to Immigration. But I just checked their website, and it seems that the Chicago field office is pretty far behind on processing these forms. I will try to keep an optimistic outlook, and hopefully we will receive it within the next two months (please oh please!)

So, as you can tell by reading so far, our homstudy is finally complete! It was a bit of a trial to make that happen. In order to understand why it took a while, let me explain a little bit about notarization as it pertains to international adoption. The personal notary stamp of the individual who is notarizing your document must not expire for at least a year and a half (and that is pushing it.) The reason for this, as explained to me best by my friend Catherine (who had it explained to her by our dossier service when she was getting a reference letter notarized for us) is that foreign governments view this expiration date as an expiration date for the document itself. So, if a document is notarized by someone who's stamp expires on say, 12/19/09, and our case has not passed court in Ethiopia at this point, that document will have expired. Such was the case of our homestudy. FRC sent out copies of our homestudy to us, Gladney and CIS, all notarized by an employee of FRC, whose notary stamp expires on said date. This was a wee bit upsetting because I just felt like, shouldn't you know this? You do homestudies for international adoptions, right? You have done this before, right? Anyway, to their credit, they were very quick in re-doing everything once I made them aware of the situation.

Another milestone we passed was finally getting approved to adopt by Gladney! (I sometimes secretly can't hardly believe that two agencies have approved us to adopt a baby. Really, us? I don't know, that seems so grown-up :-) With this approval, we have transitioned from our assistant case worker, Susanne, to our actual case-worker, Jessica. We had a conference call with Jessica last week. She is so nice and helpful (as everyone at Gladney has been, seriously, if you just stumbled upon this blog and are considering international adoption, these people are awesome and soooooo nice.) Jessica will be with us the rest of the way through this adoption process. She will be the one to call us with our referral and she will be the one to let us know if we have passed court. She gave us a rundown of the process from here on out. It seems that the average wait time for a referral right now is about 6.5 months. Once you have accepted your referral, its another 1 to 3 months just to get issued a court date, and another 10 weeks or so to have your first court date. She also made sure we understand that there are many different factors that go into passing court, and that it is a very challenging process that Gladney is not really in control of.

I can hardly believe we have already been on this adoption journey for about 6 months now. Looking back, I do wish that we had done some this differently. I wish that we had initiated the homestudy sooner, like right at the very beginning. And I wish we had been more vigilant about getting all of our documents and paperwork completed as fast as possible. But honestly, we had no idea what we were doing. And at least we will know better for the next time!