Making Progress

Good morning, famiy and friends!!

We have finally made progress with our adoption paperwork. We were at a stalemate for months due to the Army's unwillingness to provide Matt with a notarized letter of employment verification. To my utter delight, Matt was able to finally convince his commander to go down to JAG to sign the letters (which Matt composed himself) in front of a notary. HOORAY!!! To make things even better, Matt had Friday off of work so we were able to take the 15 other documents in that we have been waiting to notarize. The LAST two things to be notarized were the Power of Attorney and the Affidavit of Dossier. After notarizing them we took them to the Muscogee County Clerk's office to be authenticated. Thankfully, that was a quick and painless trip (besides running to the ATM to grab cash to pay for the authentication). Once that was completed, Matt took the boys home (that's right, we did all of this with our busy boys in tow) and I went to FedEx to ship the two documents to the Georgia Secretary of State to be authenticated at the state level. I shipped them next day even though they won't arrive until today at 10 am. I also enclosed a pre-paid return envelope for next-day shipping. That was $50 well spent. It is my hope that I will receive them back before the week is out and we will get to move on to the next step!

The Next Step.....

Once we receive the authenticated documents back, I will take both original sets of dossiers to Kinko's where I will make 3 complete copied sets. Each page of the two dossier copy sets will be notarized as original copies. The two originals and the two notarized copies will then be mailed to our adoption agency. Our agency worker will look them over to make sure we did everything correct and then she will ship them to Ethiopia. At this point, we will send in a check for $6000 which is for the remaining two installments of the total $9000 Ethiopia program fee. Money, money, money.

By the way, for those who live locally, we are trying to put together a fundraiser 5k run. I think this will be a lot of fun and I would love to have some friends run it with me! Thank you so much everyone for being so supportive and loving during this very difficult and frustrating process.