Paperwork

After accepting the referral in Astrakhan on Tuesday, our social worker e-mailed us the list of paperwork we needed to prepare, have notarized and apostilled to send to Russia before they would "invite" us to travel. I quickly prepared everything we needed and had it ready on Wednesday (yesterday) to have notarized. Since someone at Wade's work is a notary, T, J and I all drove to his work yesterday afternoon to have it all notarized. But, while she was stamping everything I noticed her notary commission expires the 28th of May. I thought I remembered a stipulation with all the adoption paperwork that the notary seal cannot be close to expiring, so when we got home I called our social worker to check on this. I was right, the document expires when the notary stamp expires, so since we probably won't have 'sister' before May 28th, we would have to re-do all these documents! So, I printed them all out again and made arrangements to be at the adoption agency by 8:15 this morning to have someone there notarize them.

Another thing we needed were photos; 2 of the two of us, 1 of the family, 1 of the boys, 1 front of the house, 1 back of the house, and four different rooms in the house. I found them all on the computer and put them in a folder hoping that Wade would arrange them nicely in Photoshop and print them out when he got home from bowling. He did, then when he went to print them at 11:00pm we found our color ink cartridge was out! So, I ran to Walgreens at 11pm last night to get a new one so we could print the pictures.

Anyway, it all worked out as planned today. We left the house about 7:45am, went to the agency, got everything notarized, went downtown to the Secretary of State office and turned the papers over to them to be apostilled, went to have breakfast, read a lot of books in the library while we waited for them to call and tell us they were ready, then...about 11am everything was good to go! We went back to the agency to turn it all in so they can mail everything to Russia tomorrow (they only mail to Russia on Fridays), then Wade went on to work and the boys and I went home. Whewww, it was a long morning. Tonight or tomorrow I'll take a look at all the documents we have to have ready to take with us on our first trip.