Dossier - check!

I've been very bad about blogging this summer, mostly because I've been on a very important mission to assemble a new dossier for a second adoption.  For those of you unfamiliar with my strange adoption lingo, a dossier is a collection of "official" papers such as marriage licenses, birth certificates, sworn statements, etc. that all must be notarized, apostilled, and translated before sending to the foreign country of your choice to be read and scrutinized by the officials in charge of approving foreigners for adoption.

The first step was getting a completed home study from our social worker, which we did in June.  Next you send that to US Customs and Immigration Services for approval.  That takes the longest.  Then you scurry about for the next month or so getting reference letters, doctor's letters, employment letters, bank letters, fingerprints (send those to the FBI), print a bunch of sworn statements, sign and notarize. 

We got our USCIS approval last week, finished up with the rest of our documents over the weekend, and after scanning them all over to the agency for review, I was given the green light to FedEx them over for assembly and preparation for the apostile step.  Our agency takes over the paper work process from here and now I just wait for phone calls and emails that alert me to the progress like:

• Sent your dossier for apostile
• Got your apostilled dossier back
• Sent you dossier to translation
• Sent your translated dossier to Kazakhstan Ministry of Education
• Ministry of Education approved and sent your dossier to Regional Authority
• Hey, we have a referral for you, want to see a picture of your potential kid?
• Can you be in Kazakhstan next week?

Exact communication there at the end gets vague, but you get my point.  Since Kazakhstan hasn't been processing adoptions for over two years and ours is likely the first dossier to get presented, we have NO IDEA how long the last four steps will take, so now we just wait.

tic toc .... tic toc .... yeah, not so good at the waiting. 

At least I've found some activities to keep me busy in the meantime, like:

• Empty guest room of all furniture (books) and repaint/decorate into a mermaid room for Miranda.  We did make $125 off six bankers boxes of books last weekend.  Hopefully we will make some progress on painting over the long weekend.
• Remake Miranda's room into nursery for new kid.
• Find, purchase and make room for new King Size bed for Ben and I.  Move current Queen Size bed into nursery for now.
• If new King Size bed requires purchase of new dressers and end tables, which is likely, clean out and organize back yard shed to make room for current dresser and end tables to be stored.
• Work - oh yeah, I have a job that will get insanely busy with auditors around September 30th.  Yea auditors!!
• Blog about Kazapalooza (it was only back in June), post video of Miranda's swim show-offs (cute, but not a lot of "swim"), take some pictures/video of new dance and soccer classes that start in the fall and blog about that ... I'm sure there is more here I could be doing.
• Work - my job also gets super busy in January so I probably will go radio silence then, but at least I will have other things to think about than the ...

WAIT.  ugh.