Of the initial paperwork, that is! Dave and I traveled to Washington, D.C. yesterday. Our adventure was meant to complete the apostille portion of his birth certificate. We left around 4:45 a.m. knowing that traffic would be busy...little do we know! We live in a city, but nothing of the scope of D.C.!!! It took about 4 hours to get into Washington, followed by arrival at the wrong office. Fortunately, our redirection was not too far off from the first office.
We had taken Fawn, so I (Sheila) walked the streets of D.C. while Dave went in to get his birth certificate apostilled by the Vital Records department of the U.S. It turns out that the apostille was free and took several minutes! What a blessing!
Our drive home was much shorter since we were traveling in the opposite direction of most traffic. After a short stop at a rest stop for Fawn to stretch her legs...she loves to chase us around, while all the while barking and carrying on! It was a fun side trip.
Our next stop was back home to drop Fawn off and then off to the PA Secretary of State. As with the previous documents, the remainder of our documents only took a few minutes to review and apostille! The woman who took care of our paperwork has a bulletin board of all the children that they have been a part of bringing home to PA. She wanted to make sure that we knew they welcomed pictures of our bundle of joy. =)
On our way home, I called Sisi, our adoption consultant, to let her know that we had completed the apostille process and would be sending copies of everything. When we got home, we had received and email acknowledging our phone call and a reminder that there were still two documents to be completed...this left Dave and I scratching our heads and wondering what in the world could be left. After looking at the documents she was referring to, we began to wonder if these were more recent requirements...ones that we would be exempt from since starting our adoption back in the summer. And, sure enough, in speaking with Sisi this morning, these documents were changes implemented after our adoption process began...so we will not have to complete them. Oh my, I cannot tell you how thankful I was to hear those words! Some of our documents are time-sensitive and the added delays will cause us to begin redoing some of them. While I know that we will need to redo some of them, anyway...it would feel much better to have our dossier in Colombia when that happens.
I took an extra day off from work today to figure out the confusion with those extra documents, touch base with Julie (Colombian Adoption Coordinator), copy all of our documents and prepare them for mailing, and hopefully get our dossier in the mail for tomorrow morning! We invite your prayers in this leg of our journey. I am not sure what the time fram will be for the dossier to arrive in Colombia. Our guide states that it would be within 2 weeks of the Oregon office receiving it. On the other hand, we are close to two major holidays for the U.S. and Colombia, so our dossier may not arrive in Colombia until the first part of January. I especially invite your prayers in protection of all this paperwork on its travels to Colombia! =)
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