DOSSIER IN THE MAIL!!!

I can’t believe it but our Dossier is in the mail!  It’s on it’s way to our agency and they will mail it to Ukraine as soon as they get it.  Once it arrives in Ukraine it will be translated and we will be registered with the Department of Adoption.  Then we will receive a submission date that will most likely be in a couple of weeks.  After our Dossier is submitted, we will then receive an SDA appointment date.  I read on another blog that from submission to travel was only 1 month for them.  If we follow that schedule, we will be traveling in the middle to end of April!  Wow!  The paperwork has been very stressful and time consuming and it is such a relief to be finished.  I laid everything out to make sure it was all there and I took a picture.  I wonder how many hours each one of these papers represents!

We haven’t received our I-171H (approval from Immigration) but we are expecting it any day.  That is all that I have left to do - one more trip to a notary, one more trip to Austin for an apostille, and one more trip to the post office. 

Now that my time won’t be consumed with paperwork, I will be focusing on the garage sale and figuring out where we will borrow the rest of the money.  Then I can move on to the fun stuff – like getting her room ready and getting a scrapbook together to take with us to Ukraine.  I have been taking tons of pictures so we can try to show our girl what her life will be like here.  Also,  I’ve read that many times it eases tension between us and the Ukrainians that we might be working with.  It seems they are very skeptical about Americans wanting to adopt Ukrainian children.  It seems so much depends on who we end up working with there.  Please be praying for those people!   In the next few days, I will post how the rest of the process works.  I hope to also have time to post some fun things that have gone on in the past month of so.  I kept meaning to post but never had the time.  For example, we had a SNOW day!  I can’t wait for you to see those pictures!