May 25th, 2009

We are still working on the contract with our adoption agency, and still looking over the documents from the home study agency that our adoption agency recommended. Here is another original post from this date by Rani:

Mike’s birth certs arrived in Saturday’s mail - again, that was fast! I got the request for my certs notarized Friday and sent off Saturday, so we’ll see how long that takes. I’m guessing it won’t be a matter of days, however, more like weeks, but again, I’ll hope for the best.

We’re still working on the homestudy agency choosing and also filling out all the contract stuff so we can get that sent off. Alas, this has been a busy week, with our trip to Niagara, a friend coming in from out of town the same day that we got back, and preparing for the major basement work that starts tomorrow. Still, it’s been a good week, and I am glad we had the opportunity to do everything that we did this week.

I’m hoping we can carve out some time this afternoon to get the contract finished up so that it can go back to the agency tomorrow.

May 22nd, 2009

We continued to acquire paperwork that we would need for our home study and dossier. Here is the original blog post by my wife Rani on this date:

We arrived back from our trip to Niagara Falls to find our first documents had arrived in the mail - that was fast! We ordered our wedding abstract from the county on Tuesday, and by Thursday our three copies had arrived. I imagine that will be one of the easiest things in this whole process, but if everything else wants to go as well, I’ll not complain.

Today’s task is going to be finishing filling out the contract with the adoption agency, getting our referrences all OK, and hopefully getting my birth certificate request notarized so that I can send it off. After that, I think the only thing left to do is make a final decision for the homestudy agency. I’m still waiting to hear back from the state office that licenses them here in Ohio. I wanted to check up on their licensure, and also make certain that the ones I’m considering have no current complaints or non-compliance issues before we make our final decision. Alas, this state office doesn’t seem to be as fast as the marriage license office…

May 17th, 2009

Home Study time! The heart of your dossier is a home study done by an accredited social worker in your state. Our adoption agency recommended one near Canton, Ohio (about 2 hours away). This will be important later (LOL). We contacted them and got a packet of stuff to fill out. Information about us, our finances, our house, etc. We needed a lot of documents, which we started to acquire. Here is the post about some of this from our original blog as written by my wife, Rani.

We’re just at the beginning still, taking our first few baby steps along what is sure to be a long journey filled with yet more paper work, emails, waiting, googling things like “apostille”, and other things I’m certain I know nothing about yet.

And really, outside of international adoption, has anyone ever heard of the word “apostille”? Even my spellcheck has never heard of it.

Today’s stroke of what may be good luck is that I found the information to order my birth certificate from the county I was born in, as compared to having to order it from the state office. Why is this a stroke of good luck? Well, the county is currently quoting a 1-2 week turn around time on such requests, whereas the state is quoting 14 weeks! Of course, the very real possibility exists that the county website is just out of date, and they are really running further behind than 2 weeks, but I am ever the optimist….we’ll see how it goes!

Meanwhile, all Mike has to do is send in a form and some money, and the state office for his state of birth will just happily send him the requested certified copies. I, on the other hand, have to have my request notarized before I can send it. I’m not certain how I feel about that. On the one hand, I’m mildly annoyed at having to track down the family notary, but on the other hand, the ID Theft Caseworker part of me is appalled that it is so easy to get the official certified copy from Mike’s state. Oh, well…such is life.

May 15th, 2009

We now set about to find our adoption agency. Neither my wife nor myself are really religious, so we quickly removed a couple of agencies from the short list. As I mentioned before, not a lot of adoptions were happening in Bulgaria at the time, so the short list was really really short. So short that only one agency remained. Well, looks like that's the one! We contacted them and they were very responsive and sent us over a packet of information about the Bulgaria program. The night we received it we made the decision to go forward with the adoption. Our journey had truly begun. We began to look at the contract and see what all it entails. Now we needed to start work on our dossier.