Paperwork

Thanks everyone for all the good vibes and well wishes! We’ve gotten many questions about what’s next, especially on timing, and we’ll fill you in on all that through the blog. Today we want to tell you about paperwork, just to give you a little window into all the hoops.

As many of you know, we’ve already completed mounds of paper work. Seriously, this is more than is required for buying a house! After we accepted our referral, we were given a new to do list of paper work, including:

• Powers of Attorney – for the two people in Ethiopia that will be handling our case. We had previously done powers of attorney, but we’ve been waiting so long that there have since been staff changes, requiring us to do it yet again.
• An updated home study – yep, expired. Gotta get an update.
• Police record and fingerprints – Had to get finger printed at the police station in San Leandro so they could do a records check and confirm that we’re clean
• Employment verification update
• Medical certification – yep we’re still healthy
• A copy of Form I-171H – this form is a confirmation that our I-600A (our fingerprints) is current
• A letter to Ethiopia’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MOWA) summarizing why we want to adopt from Ethiopia. We’ve written this letter before, but we had to do it again.

Mind you, all of these documents must be notarized. Not only that, but the notary’s commission must be current and cannot expire while we’re in process, or potentially in process. So to be safe, we had to find a notary whose commission was good until at least 2012 just to be safe. And for the Powers of Attorney and the Home Study, those notarizations need to be certified by the state. Basically, notary is a witness, and certification is official confirmation that the notary is in fact a registered notary. Redundant? Perhaps. We’ve had to do this before and it’s a real inconvenience because you can do it by mail (if you trust our postal service), or you can do it in person in Sacramento at the Secretary of State’s office. My good friend Jamie Fine, who works one day a week in Sacramento, saved us the trip and got these docs certified for us while he was in Sacto for business. Thanks Jamie!! You rock!

And of course none of this is free. Notaries cost money, and so does certification. Additionally, there are other administrative costs for couriers, certifications in Minnesota (where our agency is located), and for the Ethiopian Embassy for processing.

We were given until the end of the month to complete the paperwork, but we finished it all up last week and the package was received in MN yesterday. We should be good for the time being…but our fingerprints for the I-600A will “expire” (yep, who knew that fingerprints go bad!) in June, so we may have to do that again if we’re not back with Bedilu by summertime. They had already expired once, in June 2010, so we had to redo them to get an updated I-600A extension. The first extension is free, but if we have to do them again we’ll be charged a fee.

As difficult and annoying as all of this is, at least now we know we’re doing it for Bedilu. At least we can feel like we’re doing something to move the ball forward. But now that this is done, it seems we are waiting again, this time for a court date. In the meantime, there’s still plenty for us to do, like getting the house ready, thinking about gear/registry, figuring out travel plans for Ethiopia, and preparing our friends and family for what we can all expect.