An adoption dossier includes documents required by the US and the country from which one is adopting. For us that is:
1. Inter-country adoption application letter
2. Birth certificate for Father
3. Birth certificate for Mother
4. Marital status certificate
5. Employment Verification for Father
6. Employment Verification for Mother
7. Financial status certificate
8. Physical examination certificate for Father
9. Physical examination certificate for Mother
10. Criminal/ Non-criminal record certificate for Father
11. Criminal/ Non-criminal record certificate for Mother
12. Home study report
13. USCIS Clearance (I-797)
We also included Power of Attorney documents to go through the certification process just in case one of us isn't able to travel this time.
Our agency processed the dossier for us with our other adoptions. Pat's file was specific to a different agency, so this time we got to take care of the certification and authentication of all of the documents ourselves.
The first step (for the state of Ohio) is to certify (at the county level) all of the notaries who signed our papers. I was told that the notary is supposed to write the county in which they are actually commissioned. Some notaries apparently misunderstood this and wrote the county in which they work. This caused us so much trouble!
Not only did we manage to use notaries from ALL FOUR counties in our area, but I had to make numerous trips back and forth around the city when informed that the notaries wrote the wrong county on a total of SIX of our documents. Whew... what a week!
After the county certifications, the state of Ohio had to certify that the county seat person was legit. We also had documents from other states, so we needed state seals from four different states total. The state seals were the easy ones. I simply wrote a letter (and the check) addressed the envelopes, and handed them off to the Fed Ex guy! Fed Ex is quickly becoming my new best friend.
Thursday was the really HARD day. The bulk of our documents were sent to the courier along with copies of the original documents and copies of the county and state seals. There were also forms for the Chinese authentication step. It took a lot of concentration and attention to detail. Or perhaps my brain was just on meltdown from the week's activities which made it seem harder than it actually was.
We've now reached the final step for our dossier preparation. Three of the state seals are being certified at the Dept of State then they move on to the Embassy of China in Washington, D.C. for their authentication. The Ohio documents are in New York City to be delivered to the Chinese Consulate on Monday. Here's hoping that everything checks out fine, and in another week or so our dossier authentication will be complete.
Once everything arrives back here, (and I make yet more copies of EVERYTHING again) it will be sent to our agency to add to our references and photos that are already waiting there.
So, the much asked question.... when will we travel? With our other adoptions we were in China right about five months after the dossier submission. It is a little trickier this time around since there are some very important things happening in our family that we will need to work around --think birth of a grand baby, a son's college graduation, and then this same son getting married! We're trusting that the timing will work out to minimize the amount of time Pat waits for us, and so as not to miss any of these very important events.
Updated Monday morning: I just got a call from the courier that we hired for the dossier
documents going to the New York Chinese Consulate. Everything looks
good. They have been dropped off (with much craziness since the
Consulate was closed for Chinese National Day last week) and should be
on their way back home next Monday.
