In MFA!

I got a call today from our coordinator that our Dossier is finally in Kaz at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs! It was at the Consulate in NY exactly 4 weeks. The MFA is where we indicate our intention to adopt a Kazkhstani orphan. The estimated time in MFA is 2 months. From the MFA it goes to the Ministry of Education (MOE). Here are paper work is reviewed and we will be matched with a region. We then await a Letter of Invitation (LOI) from that particular region. Once we receive our LOI, we can then obtain visas to travel to Kazakhstan

We are starting to gather things that we will need for the trip. Wow, we will be bringing a lot!

Lessons Learned

I saw someone else post something like this and thought it was a great idea for those of you that are also adopting from Kaz. I wish everyone would do this because we all could learn from others! I will try to keep this updated as we go through this journey.

1. Get Forms Apostilled ASAP- Our agency told us to wait until we had the 171h approval before apostilling. Big Mistake. We could have saved 2 weeks of time had we not done this. We encountered big problems with apostilling. One- our notary wording was wrong (hence the next one) and a few of the forms had a mistake on it with the notary

2. Verify Notary Wording with your Secretary of States Office

3. Make sure your Salary in your Homestudy matches the Salary on your Financial Form (the Homestudy asks for your Tax Return income and the Financial Forms asks for annual income so if you receive a bonus you have to add that in a separate place on your Financial Form)

4. Start keeping a Adoption Cost spreadsheet early so you have all dates and amounts you have spent (we did do this early:>)

Off to Translate!

Got an email today saying our dossier is off to translation! We can finally sit back for a few months and let everyone else work! Of course this is the hard part because we have to sit and wait with nothing to do!

Davis keeps asking about his sister! It's so cute. He keeps saying he is going to help out with diapers and bottles! I wish he was a bit older to truly understand what is going on but I also want him to have a sister close in age. He loves babies right now! In fact, I just brought my babies that were mine home from my parents house and he is sleeping with one of them!

So we did screw up!

Well, apparently the salary of my husbands that was in the homestudy didn't match the salary on his employment sheet so we had to redo that form! Also, I apostilled the FBI fingerprint cards for Milon and I together and they should have been separate so I had to redo that also. Needless to say this post is old and I have already taken care of both.

Dossier sent off to Texas!

Today we finally mailed off our "new"dossier to get translated. I am nervous because our adoption agency has to do one finally look again. With as fast as we threw the forms together I am sure we missed something!! We will have to see!

And the Problems Start....

So up until now we have been working on approximately 25 documents that we will need to go to the Secretary of States office in NC to get apostilled. This means that they look up every person that has notarized our documents and make sure they are an official notary. Well, our adoption agency gave me what she thought was the new NC notary wording so on all of the documents I replaced the wording before filling them out and having them notarized. Today, I took all of the completed documents down to get apostilled and the wording is wrong! It was correct the way it originally was! So, we have to redo ALL of the documents! We know with every adoption, snags are hit along the way and we are just hoping this is our big one!

I71H Received!

We finally received our I71H approval today! We submitted our paperwork on Sept 5, 2007. NC is one of the longer processing time states (4 months of waiting!). This will allow us to bring our child back into the US.