Snag #1

We got an email from Grand Rapids today. Among the dossier paperwork there is an Affidavit of Names form on which we wrote down as many variations of our names as we can think of under which we've been known. Nicknames, maiden names, middle names, middle initials, "nee", the works. Thank goodness we didn't have to deal with possible misspellings; we would have needed another page.

The hawkeyes at Grand Rapids thought it would be good if we included some variations of our last name sans the apostrophe, which would normally sit in the second position, and with a capitalized and lowercased D. Variety is the spice of life. I opened up Word and typed up a duplicate of the document with the new names included and printed it out. Friday night we went over to the UPS store for the re-notarization, and Monday morning I'll take the notarized form downtown to get a new Seal, and then we'll Xerox it and send it on back. All else is well.

Dossier is out the door

We're really just waiting now. After all the state sealed documents were back, we photocopied everything four times and today I drove up to Andover to hand in the finished dossier. The ball is officially in Bethany's court now. Assuming all is well with the dossier (they'll look it over to make sure) we're now in line for a referral.

That means this space will likely be pretty quiet for a while, because there won't be a whole lot to say until we get news. If news comes, we'll post it, but I wouldn't go checking this blog every day now. Toss it into whatever RSS aggregator you use (I used to use JetBrains' Omea Reader, but now I'm a big Google Reader fan) and it'll ping you when we have something worth saying.

Just Waiting Now

Yesterday Jim and I met for lunch and notarizing, for hopefully the last time in a while. We notarized a form we'd overlooked earlier, and one that stated that the copy of the I-797C was from the goverment and not something we'd Photoshopped up. Now we're just waiting for the offices of the Secretaries of State to mail back our sealed paperwork. Their websites promised swift turnarounds on adoption documents, but nothing's arrived yet. Humph.

Update 10/13/2006 20:28 EST: Spoke too soon. In the mail today arrived State Seals from Delaware and Missouri. Texas and Ohio remain.

Update 10/14/2006 Texas arrived this afternoon. Come on Ohio!

Update 10/16/2006 OHIO!

Serious Progress

It's been a very productive paperwork week. I took all the Massachusetts documents into the Commissions Office to get the State Seal this week (although we both wish that Guatemala was an Apostille country, because they get a ribbon with their seal. It's prettier). The State Seal essentially notarizes the notary. Then on Saturday we took over the copy place and made at least four copies of everything. We organized them all and made a list of what we were still missing, which isn't very much!

We have a couple more forms that need to be notarized that were lost in previous shuffles. And we received our I-797C in the mail yesterday! That's a much more exciting event when you know that it follows the fingerprinting, which we only had done on Tuesday, and has been known to take months to arrive. We'll need to make four copies of that this week. All of what's missing should be taken care of in an hour, except for the remaining State Seals that we sent off to four other state capitals.

So now we're counting down: Massachusetts State Seal -- DONE!

More Fun with Notaries

We finally have all the pieces assembled. We're almost ready to send off the dossier to Grand Rapids where it can be translated into Spanish and we can get on the referral waiting list. The last two days have been a flurry of official business. Fingerprints were taken. Documents were notarized. Money changed hands. Officials were bribed.

No, of course that isn't true! We did get our fingerprints taken yesterday morning, though. We went to a dingy-looking office in downtown Boston with a banner stapled to the wall saying, "Welcome to the Department of Homeland Security!" The Dept. of Homeland Security looks a lot like the DMV. We went in, took a number, and waited half an hour for our turn to be called. We were taken into the back room, and they took our prints using a scanner gadget that was able to give the operator real-time feedback on the quality of the print. Then a severe-looking Jack Webb type came over and double-checked everything before they let us go.

Last night we went over our instructions and discovered that we had to get a Great Seal on most of our documents. We had neglected to do that. So we sent various notarized documents and checks to Austin (marriage license), Columbus (birth certificate), Jefferson City (another birth certificate), and Dover (employer letter) to get Great Seals attached to them all, and this morning Rebekah went to the appropriate Boston office to get Massachusetts Great Seals on all the locally notarized documents. Once there, she was told that the medical letters we had had notarized at our doctor's office were not correct, which spawned a series of phone calls to various mobile notaries trying to get someone to meet me at our doctor's office today to do this thing up right. 123Notary is a swell resource if you find yourself in a bind like that.

Now the plan is to get the dossier mailed off by the end of next week if the various secretaries of state get on the ball for us. Phew.