Paper Trail: Take 2

I would apologize for not updating in the last week since it feels like so much has been going on, but it's mostly been me freaking out so I don't think you'll mind too much.  ;-)

Anyways, now I have finally figured out what is going on and what I need to do.  Yay!!  We have re-ordered most of our documents in duplicate.  (Luckily, this time we don't need the triplicate!)  My mom is awesome and is getting our court documents (marriage license & birth certificates) for us and getting them certified and all that too!  We also have several close friends and family who are helping us out with new letters of recommendation and a guardianship statement.  Basically, our friends and family rock!!  :-)  This side of the pond, we are still waiting on our medical exam complete with tons of new blood work, but that's on Thursday morning, so we should get it by next week.  We will then just be waiting on D's 2 documents he needs to get from work.  Sadly, those could take long enough to hold us up but I am hoping the people who are kind enough to do those for us are having slow days and don't mind getting those to us by next week.  Once we get those, the real "fun" begins!!

We get to take all of our "German originating" documents to a local Notar (notary).  They will notarize all of the original documents for us as well as provide us with notarized copies of our passports and our 2011 tax returns (which we just got last week!  That's another blessing, but that's another story...) In the US, notaries are easy enough to get at most banks/credit unions and are virtually (if not entirely) free.  Here, not so much.  Notaries are actually pretty elite.  There are only so many of them registered and there's a cap, so finding one isn't terribly easy.  They are also expensive.  We're going to be paying 13 Euros PER DOCUMENT!  We need 18 documents total!  And, as if that weren't bad enough, after they are notarized we have to get them certified by the "district court".  I am only guessing on who this is.  The Notar will tell us, so I'm not terribly worried about being vague on this detail.  But, if it's who I think it is, then we're looking at another 13 Euros per document!  But, that just isn't quite enough pain yet.  Then, we have to send them off to the Federal Office of Administration to be Authenticated by Germany.  The fee?  15 Euros per document!!  And, because that doesn't cause me to hyperventilate enough just thinking about it, we have to take these notarized, certified, and German authenticated documents to the Crescent Moon embassy in Frankfurt to have then Authenticated once more!  The cost?  Another 15 Euros per document!  Oh, they are bleeding us dry!!!  Over 1,000 Euros just to get our documents authenticated!  Yikes!!!  In America, this entire procedure would be 1 step less AND cost practically nothing!!  I knew we would be paying more to have things done while we live overseas, but I expected the cost to come from shipping and online ordering fees and things like that, certainly not from such a crazy complicated process!  And this doesn't even include the last 2 weeks that I spent frantically scouring the internet and calling several Crescent Moon embassies (who, btw, don't answer their phones when they are supposed to and who are lucky to speak English) before I finally called the German Federal Office of Administration in Köln and got in touch with someone who explained everything very clearly.  It was the most stressful part of the process so far!  German bureaucracy is a nightmare in itself, but adding Crescent Moon's craziness in there was just too much for me!  BUT, at least now we know what we need to do!  That's the great news!!

As for my I-800A, I still haven't heard anything else.  I have convinced myself that if I don't get a pink slip (the dreaded "Request for Evidence" that can cause everything to come to a screeching halt) in the mail tomorrow, I can breathe a little bit easier.  Why tomorrow, I'm not really sure.  It just popped into my head and when I do the math, it makes sense there too, so I'm going with it.  ;-)  My placing agency told me that I should call and speak with the agent handling our case and ask how long they think it will be before we get our acceptance letter so we can know when we need to have our documents ready by, but I haven't gotten the guts to do that yet.  I mean, this person has the power to approve or deny us and I don't want to say something stupid that will make them turn us down.  Maybe if I don't get that pink slip in the mail tomorrow, I will be brave enough to call.  We'll see.  :-)

Things are going.  Not as quickly as I would like, but they are still moving at a good speed - at God's speed - and I am good with that!  I will continue to keep you posted.

-V

Extension

We have gotten our extension with Crescent Moon, so now we have until September 13th to get our paperwork in!  That *should* be easy to do.  I hope!  At this point, I'm pretty sick of any and all paperwork and we're not out of the woods yet.  I got an email from our placing agency today and it almost made my head explode when I first read it.  Then a few hours later, I tried to just think about what it had said and it almost made my head explode again.  Now, 12 hours later, I can finally read it.  (Did I ever mention that adoption is a stressful process?)  It looks like instead of them getting our documents authenticated, we are going to have to do all of that ourselves.  It looks like we will have to re-order most, if not all, of our documents with an over-abundance of state seals then get them certified AND notarized in Germany.  Then, we will have to take them to the Crescent Moon embassy, which is in Berlin, to get them authenticated.  Oh, how this stresses me out!  Simply re-ordering all the documents was about a 6-7 on a scale of 10.  But, having to get anything official from the German government is going to be a nightmare!  They won't touch American documents.  It's some weird rule they have.  So, I have NO idea how that's going to work!  Then we have to potentially drive to Berlin.  It's on the other side of the country!  I really hope we can do that by mail, but I'm not even sure they will speak English.  Having German as our common language isn't very comforting.  :-\  We are going to call our placing agency now that they should be in the office and get more clarification, but this is massively overwhelming today.  I really hope this is easier than it sounds because it sounds like climbing Mt. Everest in swim fins might be easier.  :-(

Paperwork headaches

We did our paper chase as soon as we were given the green light, which left our documents dated from mid-September to the beginning of October.  I always heard they were valid for a year (some for 18 months or even 2 years), so I wasn't worried because I was confident that we would be able to complete everything in that time-frame since we already had our child selected.  Well, apparently we are going to need to re-order several (if not all!) of the documents again because they need to be less than 6 months old to be "authenticated".  I'm not exactly sure what that means yet, but I'm assuming that they mean they need to be less than 6 months before they get sent to Crescent Moon with our Dossier.  *sigh*  I'm a little bummed about the cost of replacing all of those documents, but I'm much more upset about the time and headache that will be involved in re-ordering them.  I had at one time saved all of the request forms, but since I figured I would no longer need them, I might have to look them up all over again.  It sounds easy, but is surprisingly difficult.  My mom had to order several of the forms for me because I no longer have a US driver's license or state issued ID.  Apparently, Passports don't count as verification when ordering state documents and they sure don't care about my German driver's license!  I'm telling you, just knowing that I will have to go through that nightmare again is going to be a thorn in my flesh until it's over again!  I was SO happy when I was done because I thought I was DONE!  I'm trying very hard not to blame our home study agency for taking 3 months longer than they promised, but if they had gotten the correct home study to us on time, our document would still be less than 6 months old.  :-(  I know the adoption process is an uncertain thing, but I always thought the many government agencies involved would be the unpredictable ones!  I never expected a "respectable" agency would be the one to screw us up so badly!  Right now we've got a lot going on with DJ switching schools in the fall and a TON of bureaucratic nightmares there, so I'm probably over-reacting to the need to order more documents, but right now it feels like a ton of bricks on me.  I'm just very grateful that we have the money to cover the additional cost and to know that despite set-backs like this, everything is still in God's hands.  He is still watching over Z and He is still directing and guiding the process.  I just hope I don't break from all the stress in the process.

I-800A Received

Technically, this isn't really a big step or anything, but it's something so I'm still excited about it!  I just received my email saying that the USCIS has received our application and it is being routed to the National Benefits Center for processing.  This is our biggest obstacle and yet I am feeling a mixture of overwhelming calm and excitement, but I'm not afraid or nervous at all.  Now is the time we get to witness God perform a miracle!!  :-) As always, I will keep you posted!

I-800A application

Hurray!!!  We finally got our revised home study in the mail yesterday!!  Good timing because I woke up freaking out that our Dossier deadline was only a month and a half away and that we were doomed if it didn't get here yesterday.  2 and a half months of stressing about the home study has really taken its toll on me, so I am glad that part is OVER!!!!  (Yes, I'm SO glad that it warrants overuse of exclamation points!  lol!)

As soon as D and I read over the home study to make SURE the errors were gone, we stuffed in in the envelope with the I-800A application that we printed MANY months ago, copies of our birth certificates, a copy of our marriage license, fingerprint cards for each of us, and a large check.  Unfortunately, it was too late to make it to the "main" post offices, so we went a little out of the way to go to Globus (a little like Wal-Mart) where they have a mail station that is open much later.  I was expecting to pay handsomely to get the envelope there ASAP, but they said that it would only cost 3.45 Euros!  They said I could pay more, but that it wouldn't actually get there any faster, so there wasn't much point.  And, as important as the contents are to me, they are easily replaceable on the off chance that they get lost, so there wasn't much point in paying more for that either. They said they guessed the envelope would get there in 6-7 days.  Based on my experience mailing letters, that sounds about right to me.  Sometimes they get there even faster, but it's going to TX, so it might take a bit longer than they do to get to IL.  Maybe.  Our placing agency said the approval process typically takes about 10 weeks, but I am hoping that since we already included fingerprints it will be much quicker.

So, now we wait for our application to get to TX, then we wait for them to review it.  I wonder if God had our home study have so many delays so that a certain person might get hired by the USCIS that will approve our case.  This is *the* step that we foresaw being the major hurdle.  If we can get this approval, we should be good.  Getting Z a German visa may be tricky, but that shouldn't be too bad since she will be a US citizen at that point.  But, this is the step where the USCIS may ask us for that mythical "letter" from Germany.  If that happens, I'm prepared to put up a good fight.  We have a LOT of evidence that easily points to us being "habitual residents" of the US, which I am hoping might persuade the German officials to provide this "letter".  If not, hopefully it is enough to convince the USCIS that we meet the criteria even if Germany won't give us the "letter".  My overactive mind also has "plans" to try to track down and meet with some of the political higher ups of Germany.  The new president of Germany always struck me as the kind of guy who might be willing to take a stand for our situation and maybe change the anti-adoption mentality that many Germans seem to hold.  If it comes to it, I will seek him out and, who knows, maybe that will bless more families than just ours by changing the long-held mindset of this country.  I don't really think I will have to do any of the above "persuading", but I always have a "plan B" forming in my mind.  (It's kind of annoying actually)  At any rate, I feel a wonderful peace knowing that the fate of our adoption and Z is now completely in God's hands!  I know that He will deliver our application to the right person and that He will guide the process along.