Documents going on a trip.

Wow. Yesterday was a full day. M and I spent large chunks of time writing/reviewing/editing the final draft of our adoption petition. It's like writing a thesis in double time. But it was the last document we needed to complete to move forward, so we hashed it out. M kept saying, "It's great! It's perfect! It's done! You don't need to do anything more on it!" But several tweaks later... it was even better (I hope).

We are somewhat more motivated by the CCAA's new restrictions involving health, wealth, age, etc. We are very lucky that we are not immediately impacted. But it does make us that much more eager to get our paperwork in the queue.

Anyway, we then compiled our documents and braved holiday traffic (ack!) to go first to the bank for all the notarizations we'd accumulated (our bank does free notarizations for us--yea!), and then to our favorite mailing store where they know we are in the thick of adoption paperwork.

All of the 14 documents went off to the secretary of state's office to be certified. Whee! The only low point was that one of the guys at the shop told us a scary story about another couple who had sent off the same kind of batch to the sec. of state's office, only to have their documents shredded! They had to start over from scratch. Oh, I really didn't need to hear that. But I figure that there's no point in worrying about such extreme disasters until/unless they occur. Have I not already done my share of worrying?? Why, yes, I have.

I don't know if that office will even be open the week after Christmas. It's possible that they will be out until January. But if they are /in situ/, we might get them back before New Year's. The other birth certif we had to send off to another state was turned around and back in our hands in fab record time!!!

After we had sent off the whole thing, I finished feeling snippy and went straight into feeling weepy and tired. It's been an emotional ordeal, and more so when I have been doing the bulk of the paperwork and obsessing over getting all the little details right. M points out that even though we've had to focus on the dry and picky paperwork, each part is embued with emotion, and that has an impact. The fact that we've sent off what we think are ALL the docs we need to finally almost finish our dossier is very emotional. It's also a relief. I feel like we've been running a long race, and we've finally reached a major milestone and can coast for a while. Of course, this is just a breather before we are back at it to finish the process entirely.

Left to do:
Have extra passport photos made for via purposes.
Photocopy and sent to placing agency for dossier review.
Send to Chinese embassy via courier to be authenticated and translated.
Transfer more money to cover agency fees.
Photocopied in entireity and sent to our agency with two LARGE CHECKs.

And then we will be finished only two months behind my original goal. Ah well. Onward.