Progress is happening on the adoption front. We've gathered all our dossier documents except immigration approval. This morning, we had an appointment with our notary, and got everything notarized.
This afternoon, we successfully attempted an early walk in with the local immigration office. Not terribly early--our appointment is for Tuesday, so only a couple of days, but next week is finals week for Annaliese, and we had an 8 a.m. appointment. The security guard did a double take at the date and asked why we were early, and when I explained he let us proceed. We were in and out in under half an hour! The place was almost empty, it was an answer to prayer!
After getting back, Paul decided to run our documents up to the Secretary of State's office to be certified. Only they kicked back several documents because they didn't like the way they were notarized. :( And this was after our agency approved them. SO frustrating!
Paul followed the advice of the Secretary of State's staff and took the docs down the street to another notary and re-notarized them. Then he took them back to SofS and had them certified. It's a lot of running around to do, but we saved over $450 by doing it ourselves, rather than having our agency do it for us.
This weekend, I'll spend some quality time at Staples making photocopies for the Chinese consulate in San Francisco, and for our agency, and for our records, and then next week we'll take them to the city to be authenticated.
We are getting close to the half way mark! Once all our documents go to China, we get a couple months "break" from paperwork, while we wait for it to be translated and processed. I am so looking forward to waving goodbye to that box of paper!
Please pray that our immigration approval comes quickly, and that none of our funky, over notarized documents get rejected by the consulate. Thanks!
That sounds so frustrating but glad to hear everything's coming along! I wondered if we should do the authenticating ourselves but our agency does it and it's already included in our fees. I don't know if we could've saved money, maybe next time?! Hope everything goes smoothly!
ReplyDeleteWe are having the same problem. I'm just praying that our docs bring twice notarized will clear everything ok. Funny (not really) problem to have!
ReplyDeleteI'll cross my fingers for the both of us, LTAH.
ReplyDeleteKristin, our agency charges $800 for state cert and $800 for authentication. We can do both for a little over $1,000. But a lot of this has to do with where we live. If we had to use a courier, the cost would be closer to even, the savings would only be time. Nobody rushes things like a mama with a picture of her baby in hand, right?
Didn't know you were adopting again. Congratulations!! My first thought was: is it Eddie?? We are in process again too. Would love to see you in Guangzhou again. Samantha
ReplyDeleteNOT adopting again, sorry. I was cleaning up some broken links on the blog, and an old post from 2012 accidentally reposted as new instead of saving where it was originally posted.
DeleteEddie DOES have a family in process for him! I'm keeping up with their journey on facebook.
Tell me about your new child to be!