We have 2 pieces of paper left to complete for our dossier. One is a reference letter from a friend and the other is a letter to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in Ethiopia that Kevin and I have to write, explaining our intentions to adopt an Ethiopian child. After we have those 2 documents we get everything notarized, write a huge check and send it in. Honestly, we should be done in the next week. My goal is to have it sent off before Christmas vacation starts (in 9 days).

Oh and here’s a cool twist in our adoption journey. I recently found a friend from college on facebook who is wanting to adopt a boy, from Ethiopia. She and her husband have just started the process but it’s nice to know that I am already friends with someone who will have a family that looks like ours.

We now have all of our birth certificates, marriage certificates, letters of employment, health records & our home study. I heard from the people writing our letters and they are on their way. We just need a few more pieces of paper and our dossier is ready to go. We are trying to get all of that done this week.

We are actually making pretty real progress on getting our dossier completed. I would love it if we could have it sent in before Thanksgiving, but I don’t think that we will get all the letters we need in time - most people have either gotten them written and the are in transit or they aren’t written yet and I’m not sure we can pay the gianormous bill that needs to be sent in with the paper work.

Here’s what we do have done:
We’ve sent for our birth certificates, employer letters, medical letters and reference letters.
We’ve had our passport photos taken.
We’ve talked to our bank and chief of police regarding those letters (we have to talk to someone in person for those).

Here’s what’s holding us up:
We need to get everything notarized and can’t do that until we have each piece of paper in hand.
We need the letters we’ve asked for to show up at our house.
We need to figure out how we are going to pay for it.

Tonight we completed another step in our dossier paperwork - the whole fam got their passport photos taken. For the low, low rate of $47.00 we stood in front of a white wall while the proex guy snapped our photos with a digital camera. Then he brought his camera card over to the kiosk where customers can print their own digital pictures and printed them up for us. Seriously, is that really worth $47.00 for 18 1×2 bad pictures? The sign over the kiosk said a 4×6 is $0.19. So by my math that should have cost us $3.42. But to the credit of proex, they charged us $16.00 for a set of 6 pictures of each person (and we each needed 4) while other places were charging $12.00-$14.00 for a set of 2. I guess that means we got a deal?

Our dossier contains a lot of things I would have expected - requests for birth certificates, letters of reference, tax returns, fingerprints, etc.

But I never expected to have to get a letter signed by the Chief of Police stating that I have no criminal record or outstanding warrants.

If you haven’t heard the term before a ‘dossier’ is a big fat packet of important documents that need to be noterized in order to finish our end of the adoption process. It also requires several copies of things like marriage certificates, birth cerficates, passport photos, taxes, letters from our doctor, our bank, our insurance, our friends and when it’s completed several checks need to be written and sent along with it.

Our dossier is sitting in a big stack in Kevin’s office. We really need to get going on it. Because at this point we are holding up our own adoption.

So bug us please. Ask us how far we’ve gotten in completing the packet.

Thanks