Adoption Update

Where to begin?  Our dossier finally made it over to Biro, our friends that traveled over this weekend brought it with them - we are very excited about that.  There are, as usual, a few hiccups.  Our homestudy agency is currently blacklisted by Russia.  What is "blacklisting" you may ask (I know I have), it means that the agency is delinquent on post placement reports from adoptive families of Russian children.  Adoptive families are required by Russia to complete post placement reports for the first 3 years after the child is adopted, we already had a signed contract with our homestudy agency to do this and now we will have to find a new agency to do the reports.  It could be worse, they could have rejected our homestudy and made us start over from scratch again which would have been devastating.   Right now we are trying to get a new agency and updated letters to notarize and then apostille and send over to Biro.  Any IA (international adoption) family can tell you that you QUICKLY become friends with your local notaries and the States Office because everything that goes over has to have both a notary stamp and an apostille seal.  Make sure you check the notaries stamp expiration date BEFORE they sign and stamp your form or you may have to get it redone.  Make sure you have at least a year before the date expires or you will likely end up having to get the letter done again (and notarized again and apostilled again and sent to your agency again and then sent to Russia again - seeing the pattern??) save yourself time and headaches by asking the notary for this information ahead of time, we have had to have a few documents redone due to the notaries stamp expiring, it costs both time and money (and sometimes your sanity) trying to get them redone and resubmitted.  Highly recommend getting a large and sturdy accordion file folder to track and keep copies of everything (and they mean EVERYTHING) that you send over there as they may loose it or need another copy and when you are 1/2 way around the world, you want to make sure that you can provide the documents if needed in court.  The big hiccup we had before this was our immigration letter, new policy in the US only lists your first and last name however Russia needs your full passport name on there (which includes your middle name) - a time savor that we learned after the fact is to call the immigration office within 2 days of getting your finger prints done and requesting that they generate the letter WITH your middle name.  In our case we received the letter incorrectly and then it took over a month to get a corrected version (also took multiple calls to immigration) so just a helpful tip to save you some time.

I have more updates but not the time to post them now, will hopefully finish my update tonight.