First of all, Lu at Poppies Blooming was kind enough to put together this blog makeover for me! AND, she also made us a button that you can grab and put on your blog or website. Thanks, Lu!

We get a lot of questions about when we’re bring Erika and Ilya home and where exactly we are in the adoption process. I know that not everyone knows the ins and outs of the adoption process or the country that we’re working with. I am not allowed to name what country we’re adopting from and if you do know, please refrain from mentioning it in the comments. Instead of working with an agency, we’re working with a team of volunteers from Reece’s Rainbow and an independent facilitator to put together a dossier to send to Erika and Ilya’s country.

A dossier is a packet of papers that explains our hope to adopt them, how we can provide for him, exactly who we are and also has all of our police clearances and permission from the US for us to adopt. A big packet of papers. Each paper in the dossier must be carefully put together, signed, notarized and apostilled. An apostille is a silly piece of paper attached to a notarized document saying that the notary is really a notary, and confirms the details of the notary’s appointment. This is something that we get from the Secretary of State in Topeka.

Many of the papers in our dossier are papers that just Aaron and I needed to sign and have notarized. I think that we have all of these papers done, with the exception of one which will need to be redone. There are several more papers which we also need to include in our dossier, which we need to rely on others for. One such document is a letter from Aaron’s employer confirming his employment and salary. Other documents that we need to get from other people include our medical forms, Kansas Bureau of Investigation clearances, proof of home ownership, etc.

Once our dossier is completed, we will mail it to Erika and Ilya’s country. It will be translated into their language and submitted to the proper authorities. After a couple of weeks, we’ll get a travel date, which will be 10-30 days out.

I really haven’t answered anyone’s question about WHEN we might travel yet. The magical paper that will probably determine when we travel is our I-171H. This is the paper from immigration saying that we have their permission to bring two children into the country. To get the I-171H, we sent a form to immigration about a month ago. Once immigration gets our homestudy, they will give us a fingerprinting appointment. Then, we wait and wait for our I-171H. I’ve heard that this can take 2-3 months. I imagine we’re talking at least another month before our fingerprinting appointment. So this would put us in about October. Which is what we want.

We’re hoping to mail our dossier in October and travel in November. As much as I’d love to go sooner, Aaron has a very important exam on October 30th, that he has to be here for. There are a few other ways that we could work around that date, but we’ll just have to see…