What A Week!

I know that I have readers who vary from folks who found me linked on someone else's adoption blog to my cousins as well as friends I've met online and some IRL friends, too. I don't know exactly who all is reading since most of you don't comment or at least that's my understanding. At any rate, those of you who don't know the ins and outs of adoption may either be highly annoyed by this post or possibly very interested to get a glimpse (and a tiny one, actually) at just a smidgen of the paperwork process that is international adoption. Feel free to stop reading now if you are beginning to feel the slightest bit bored. Go ahead, it won't hurt my feelings...I'll never know! But as this is mostly about ME being able to chronicle this process, I'm blogging about my very busy week.

Let's begin with Friday before last (9/28) when we received via Fed Ex a nice package full of paperwork. The agency director had emailed and mentioned that it was on its way so we were very excited to receive it! It contained two different Power of Attorney (POA) forms as well as our adoption contracts (in Chinese!) and an agency contract and an invoice (what, this isn't free?) and some other paperwork and instructions. At this point in the process, what needs to happen is this group of paperwork has to be signed and notarized and those notarized documents must be sent to our Secretary of State so that the SoS can verify that the notary who notarized stuff is actually a notary and not some random guy off the street who found a notarial seal and started notarizing stuff for fun. ANYWAY....once the documents are AUTHENTICATED by the SoS, they come back to us and we then make copies (2 sets, one to send with the originals and one to keep) for TECO. TECO is the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office. The one in charge of handling documents for our state is in Atlanta. OK, that's a lot of background, but it's necessary for us to move on with the story.

So, the documents arrived Friday and I spent a good while that night reading and re-reading them and making sure I understood which documents just had to be signed and returned to our agency vs. which documents had to be notarized and sent to be authenticated, etc. Saturday a.m. we had a phone conference with our agency director to discuss the paperwork and we asked some questions and then we emailed our Social Worker (MBK who ROCKS!!!!!) around noon'ish to ask some state-specific questions. She answered us within a couple of hours (on a Saturday, no less...see why she ROCKS?!!!!!) So I felt like I had a pretty decent grip on what went where and how to proceed with everything.

On Monday afternoon I have everything in the overnight to go to SoS for authentication - including a self-addressed stamped return envelope to get back to us as quick as possible. On Wednesday I receive the package back!!! Wow...talk about fast, right? A two day turnaround from the SoS?! I was ecstatic!!! (Cue the cliffhanger music here.) Turns out they have NOT authenticated our adoption contracts (in Chinese!) because I failed to include the English translation for them. Yikes....I just didn't think they needed that since the translation itself isn't notarized. But they do...so I have to re-send the contracts and this time include the English translation. But hey, at least they were able to authenticate the rest of the stuff, right? Well, right AND wrong! After looking at the certificate and thinking "something doesn't look right" I realized they actually spelled our notary's last name WRONG. That's right...their whole purpose is to verify that THIS notary is a real notary and they actually spelled her name WRONG! So anyway...I do the whole process of self-addressed return envelope (at $16.25 a pop) and overnight delivery (at $19 a pop) again on Wednesday, including the translation and asking them to double check the spelling of our notary.

On Friday it was all back to me AGAIN, corrected and BEAUTIFUL!!!!! Wooo Hoooo!! Even with the errors, I cannot say enough GOOD things about the SoS here...seriously, they really came through with the super-fast service, don't you think? They could've done a LOT worse than a two day turnaround and for that I am so grateful!

By Friday at 5 p.m. everything had been copied twice and was finally on its way to TECO in Atlanta. I am hoping and praying beyond measure that I did it all correctly.
If I did, now we just wait on TECO to authenticate and send everything back to our agency and then it goes with the rest of our dossier to Taiwan and enters the courts. After that....it's all in the hands of the judge.

Those of you who pray, would you pray for a speedy court process for us? There is talk on all of the Taiwan Adoption Message Boards of a "FAST JUDGE" who wastes no time and really gets families through his court quickly. Would you pray that we get the FAST JUDGE and that maybe...just maybe our boy could be home SUPER SOON!!!! Those of you who don't pray....WHY THE HECK NOT????????