HOMESTUDY,USCIS,APOSTILLING AND AN UPDATE

Our notarized home study (7copies of it) arrived yesterday.,

we sent our USCIS I-600A application & packet of supporting documents to Texas.The I-600A is the "Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition". Getting an approval means that our government is giving permission for us to adopt a child they will send us a fingerprint appointment yes our 3rd set of fingerprints taken.then if  they see us fit they will send us the I-171A letter that goes into our court Dossier.
we are working on our application dossier and have hit a couple snags 4 of our documents have to be notarized again because something was forgotten or needs to be worded differently. we are taking this in stride and will just do it. we are waiting for 2 more things from our social worker that need to go in this part of the Dossier. as soon as we have these things notarized we will send them to Salem to the secretary of state to be apistilled. (A special sign established in 1961 for certifying foreign documents. Under the Hague Convention, signatory countries have agreed to recognize public documents issued by other signatory countries if those public documents are authenticated by the attachment of an internationally recognized form of authentication known as an "apostille." The apostille ensures that public documents issued in one signatory country will be recognized as valid in another signatory country. [) what they do is check that each document is notarized in the correct legal way by a legal notary and that the notary's license is not suspended or expired. then if it looks good they put a seal on the document, sorta like a sticker I think and I'm not sure yet if its gold or silver. but it is very official looking.(this first set has 24 documents in it at $10 each so it is costing us $240. the next set has 35 so that will be $350. so in all we will be spending $590 in apostilling documents. so when we say every penny helps us we are not kidding!) when we get all of the documents back and they have all been apostilled we can then send our application part of the dossier to our agency. they will look it over to make sure its all there and then send it to our facilitator, who will also look it over and translate it then take it to committee for approval. they then send us a date to receive our official referral for Josiah's SDA appointment. and then we'll know when we are going to travel for our first trip. before we travel we have to get our court part of our dossier done and mailed so the judge can look it over and send us a date for court after we get back from our first trip. there are many things we still need to get done for the court dossier one big thing is getting all 6 kids into the DR. for check ups. the Dr. has to sign a letter for each one saying they are healthy, and we have to get 6 copies of her license all notarized of course.we hope insurance will pay for this but we do have a $20 copy for each kid so it will cost at least $120 there are other things still to be done but I hope to have them done at least by the end of this month. my best guess is still that we go see him the end of July first of August. please pray everything goes smoothly and that we get the funds we need to go.