My Drama-Filled Paperwork Day

I (Sherry) got a ton of paperwork done today, but it was not without a fair amount of drama.  About a week ago, we finally got our approval from Immigration that we'd been waiting on.  We first applied to Immigration in July, we were fingerprinted in September, and we've been waiting ever since.  The week of Thanksgiving, they requested more information, so our social worker reworded the information she'd already sent and we sent the new document to Immigration.  A few days later, we got the Approval.

We're under a time crunch because our documents have to be less than a year old when they reach China.  That means our documents start expiring March 3.  If we have to do documents over again, we're basically going to have to start from scratch.  We still have a few steps to go in the process, so we've been tapping our feet waiting for that Immigration document.

Today, I drove to Richmond (about a 2 hour drive) to get 12 documents authenticated at the state level.  Basically, this means that the Secretary of VA is certifying that the document is notarized properly.  Parking was my first issue.  The website had listed 3 garages where I could park.  One of them didn't exist.  One of them was about 10 blocks away, and since the wind chill today was in the teens, I went to the third one.  Well, it was only for Library patrons, which I discovered when I was already IN the garage.  The poor parking attendant saw how upset I was and let me park there, and then told me to walk out the back entrance rather than riding the elevator so that the security guard didn't give me a hard time.  She also helped me figure out exactly where I needed to go!

I get to the Secretary's office and by this time, I had walked about 4 blocks and I can barely feel various parts of my body because of the cold.  They said they would authenticate the documents while I waited!  Well, 4 of them were not notarized properly.  More drama.  Thankfully, they figured out a way we could take care of that by re-notarizing them.  Meanwhile, I'm praying it's OK for them to re-notarize the documents in question.  Those notaries will also be receiving reprimand letters!  I paid my fee and went back out into the cold with my documents.  When I left the parking garage, the nice attendant didn't even charge me for parking!!!

I stopped for lunch on the way home and called the lady at the adoption agency to ask her about the not-properly-notarized documents and she said the way we took care of it is fine.  So then I was all ready to express mail everything to the Chinese Embassy in DC.  But then she mentioned sending them to the State Department.  Turns out, I completely missed a step .... thank goodness those documents were wrong, because otherwise, I never would have called her and I would have sent everything merrily on its way to the Chinese Embassy.  They would have been returned to us and we would have lost several critical weeks.  But she did tell me that the State Dept. would send everything directly to the Chinese Embassy for me.

I drove back to Virginia Beach and headed home to make some copies of my newly authenticated documents and get a letter ready for the State Department.  I get to the UPS Store, and the line is almost out the door.  I don't care if it's 3 days before Christmas, I have adoption documents to mail, people!!!!  The very nice guy at the counter helped me figure out how to send my documents via Next Day Air, and how to do prepaid envelopes for Next Day Air from the State Dept. to the Embassy, then back to me.  He folded the envelopes inside each other and packed everything up for me.  He didn't even charge me for the 2 legal-size copies I asked him to make.

Thank you to all the very nice people that helped a very frustrated adoption-document lady today!!!!  I truly appreciate your help.

So that's our latest update.  Supposedly, it's about a 3 week turnaround for the documents to get back to us.  However, I'm not sure how much the holidays will effect that.  Once we get them back, they go to our adoption agency in OR.  If they approve everything, they'll send it all to China and the wait really begins!