It's been a little over a month since my last post! In all honesty, I have been stalling until I had good news to post, which we do! Our Dossier (Doss-ee-ae) is DONE and is en route to Vietnam.
Here is how the last month has gone to get this crazy thing done
Previously we collected all the "easy" documents like our home study, birth certificates, copies of passports, marriage certificate, etc. We had these notarized and ready to go and were just waiting for the last document we needed from USCIS (immigration). This finally came on a Friday at 4pm. We jumped in the car and went to get copies (our printer/copier decided not to work). Next we had to get it notarized. We got to the bank, but all the notaries (yes, I know who they all are) already had people they were helping, and there was one person ahead of us waiting. Luckily this cute girl that has notarized a lot of stuff for us recognized us and asked the person she was with to wait since she was pretty sure we just needed a notary. Bless her! Now we just had to get all the way to the state capital building downtown through rush hour traffic on a Friday before they closed at 5pm! Ahh! Mark did great and even performed an illegal maneuver so I could run everything in. I walked into the office at 4:57 and have never been so relieved and grateful! It was a very stressful hour, but we definitely felt the blessings as what seemed impossible worked without any problem.
This one mad dash hour was followed by a week waiting for them to add a fancy stamp authenticating the documents and notaries. Once they were ready I picked them up and was ready to send them on to the Vietnamese embassy in Washington DC. However one of the notaries forgot to do something on one of Mark's documents so before we could send it we had to have them correct it. Because of this and our work schedules it made more sense for Mark to do it and send it to the embassy. This was a little stressful for me because I had probably read the instructions on what to do and how to send them at least a dozen times. Mark, thinking me more than capable, hadn't read them at all. I started telling him everything he had to do and his response was "What if I lose everything?" I about had a heart attack. After some slow breathing I informed him that "that isn't even close to funny." While I knew he was joking, I wasn't going to take any chances so I typed up a step by step list of everything he had to do. Of course he did it perfectly and didn't even lose one thing.
The embassy said it takes on average 5-7 days for them to process our documents. We obsessively checked the tracking number for the return envelope to see if it was on its way back to us. On the 9th day we saw that it was on its way!!
Now we will send everything to our agency who will send it to the Department of Adoption (DOA) in Vietnam. We are hoping it will be logged into their system quickly as our agency has already been working on translating everything into Vietnamese. After that it's anybody's guess as to when we will be "matched" in Vietnam's records. We have heard that a big and lengthly step for Vietnam is doing a Police Report which we believe has already been done for Quinn. That could potentially shorten the wait, but they could also ask for additional documentation that would have to be notarized, state authenticated, and authenticated by the Vietnamese embassy all over again.
Please pray for the Vietnam officials that they will move quickly and not need anything else to approve our match with Quinn! Let the long (hopefully short) wait begin!
