September 26, 2010

Our adoption agency has sent our dossier copies to Bulgaria's MOJ. I almost had a heart attack when I saw the FedEx bill to overnight a ream of paper from California to Bulgaria. Today we got word from our adoption agency that we are officially registered with the MOJ in Bulgaria! YES! It has been a long journey so far, but well worth it. We are now officially listed a prospective parents and the MOJ will do their best to match us up with a child who meets our requirements. I have never mentioned it before, but we have requested a sibling group of two children (with at least one girl) and from the ages of 2 to 7. We have also requested them to be basically healthy (ha! this will be an issue later, stay tuned).

A little more about this process, you have to actually choose parameters of what you want. Will you accept special needs children? how many? boy or girl? what age? As a side note, in Bulgaria they don't offer any children under age 2, so infants are out of the question. All of this information is noted on your I-800A form, so you really can't deviate from it, which is fine, because Bulgaria will match you up with what you want. The more precise your request, the longer you will wait for a child.

Well, now the waiting begins. We are hunkering down for a long wait, hoping that our choices (sibling group) will speed up our chances of a referral.

September 9th, 2010

Our adoption agency says that the dossier looks good, so we have made 5 exact copies of it to create one official dossier that is apostilled and 5 fakes (LOL). The six of them together are one ream of paper! We overnighted them to California (where our adoption agency is located). Here is what Rani had to say about it from our original blog:

After what at times seemed like more paperwork than any two people could manage to keep straight, we finally finished our dossier and got it sent off. After translation and a few more government channels, we are officially registered with the MOJ! Now it is up to someone else to juggle that mountain of paperwork that we sent off, and up to us to wait.

September 1st, 2010

This week we have been working on getting our apostille's done with the State of Ohio. It's not a hard process, but does cost 5 bucks per apostille, and we need like 10 of them or so, it starts to add up. Also, when we arrived to get them apostilled, we missed a page that needed to be notarized. Since we were downtown, we were able to run to our bank's downtown office and get it done, then we had to run to the Clerk of Courts and get it certified, then back to the state office. Whew! We will soon be done with the dossier and will send a copy of it to our adoption agency for them to approve it.