The Dossier is Complete!!

We are proud to report that we have finally finished our dossier and are ready to FedEx it to our agency tomorrow morning! It feels great to finally have this portion of it done, now we just have to sit back and wait...easier said than done. At least now we can turn our attention to other things, like sprucing up the house a little and turning our office into a nursery :)

To give you an idea of what goes into the dossier, here is some of the paperwork we had to gather. We started in July with a home study, that took us about 6 weeks to complete. We also had to get our I171H approval from INS and fingerprints/clearance from the FBI. Then we had to obtain certified copies of our birth certificates, as well as our marriage license. We also had to get notarized letters from our work, bank, mortgage company, and our doctor, which included several medical tests. The paperwork also included numerous forms that were provided by our agency that needed to be filled out and notarized. Once everything had been notarized, we then took it to the Secretary of State's office to be Apostilled. By this point the stack of papers has grown to 60 sheets! Then we needed to make 5 complete copies of the dossier, one copy for us and 4 to send with the originals to our agency. So in all, we have 360 sheets of paper, 300 of which will be FedExed tomorrow. That is a stack of papers over 2 inches tall and weighing a couple of pounds! To give you an idea of how much that is, we took a few pictures of our hard work.

Once the paperwork is received by our agency, they will review it to make sure it is complete and then it is sent for translation. Translation can take from 1-2 months. We hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas and New Year!