Two Week Waiting Period

I just got an email from our agency today. It appears that our paperwork was turned in and we are now in the waiting period. The government of Ukraine has two weeks to review our papers and either reject our petition or give us an appointment date to travel to Kiev. As far as I can tell, there are no public holidays for Ukraine in July. Since the papers were submitted on June 30th, we expect those two weeks to be up by July 14th.

No News Is. . .

Our submission date came and went this week. So far we haven't heard anything from Ukraine - good or bad. I'm just grateful that we haven't gotten word that one of the documents needed to be redone in a rush. I hope that means all went as planned. After all this time this adoption might really be happening! I wish it was getting easier and not harder to wait.

We have a submission date!

Our papers were delivered to our facilitator on Thursday. He has confirmed that they all look fine, and today he turned in the home study and was given an official date to turn in the entire dossier: June 30. It was important that the date fall before July 6, since one of the papers expires on that date. So we are officially farther than we ever got with the two previous dossiers. Also, we are getting a break from constantly working to keep the process moving; it's out of our hands now.

Trip to Indy

Yesterday I picked up the final revised papers and took the whole bundle down to Indianapolis to get apostilles for them. Apostilles are the legalization that allows the documents to be used internationally.
There ended up being 15 documents in my pack of revised papers that needed apostilles - the cut-off number for how many documents you can walk through the office at the Secretary of State in Indy. One of the additional papers we needed to have redone was Stan's state police clearance. It listed him as "female!" The facilitator in Ukraine caught the typo and the state police had a corrected document in our hands in about 3 days.
After getting the seals placed, I popped the documents in the mail to our agency in Pennsylvania. They should be arriving tomorrow. We are feeling the time crunch now as our papers will start to out date at the beginning of July. If there aren't any more hold-ups, we may be submitting the documents to the government in Ukraine in 3-4 weeks. Pray that there won't be any more surprises on our paperwork.
When we were living overseas, there were a handful of people who made this mad dash to Indy for us when we couldn't do it ourselves. As I was driving down and back, I was thanking God for friends and family who stepped in to give us a hand. Thanks, everyone of you who have helped out in one way or another. We appreciate all you've done to help.

Paperwork in Ukraine

We watched the Fedex tracking site this past week as our bundle of paperwork traveled to Ukraine. It arrived on May 5th and on May 6th we got an email listing all the paperwork that needs to be re-worked. We need to revise about 8 documents including the home study and the physicals. I'm glad for an unexpected vacation day today (the doctor I work with is on his annual birding retreat) so I can crank through some of this paperwork.
It's frustrating to have to repeat some of this work, but it is also encouraging to have such prompt attention to our paperwork by both the Ukrainian facilitator and our agency. We hope that means we are near a real submission date for our dossier. Please pray that we will be able to satisfy every detail they are asking for and that we'll be able to turn around these new documents quickly.

Does this look familiar?

If this looks familiar to you, then you've been reading since the beginning. If not, check out our first post. This is most of the documents that will make up our (third!) adoption application in Ukraine.
I hate to bore you with the details of paperwork, but this is as exciting as it gets during this stage of the process. In addition to our home study, we signed, notarized, and appostilled these pages with the help of a few notaries and the Indiana secretary of state's office. Most of these documents have been sent to Pennsylvania where our adoption agency will give them a final review before they are sent to Ukraine.
In the past couple of weeks we have been handling our "rebounds" - documents that have been rejected for being incomplete or some other error. It takes just a little bit of our attention nearly every day.
We are still waiting to receive one very important paper from Indy - our updated I-171H, our U.S. permission to adopt. We hope to have that in our hands soon and finish up this final round of paperwork.

Home Study

True to our social worker's word, the turn around time on our home study was timely. We received our home study draft on Feb 4th. Stan worked hard last weekend and got it corrected and back to our social worker by the 8th.
We've also heard back from our facilitator in Ukraine. The information he's giving us is pretty encouraging about the wait to submit the dossier. The last time we turned in our paperwork to the facilitator, the wait time was a matter of months. It looks like this time it will be a matter of weeks.
That wait doesn't start, however until after we get the paperwork sent to Ukraine. Once the home study document is finished, it will go to Indy for the USCIS department to issue an updated "permission to adopt." We are also waiting on our final copies of our physical forms (Ukraine changed the forms again and we'll have to get them filled out a second time!). There are another 12+ forms that we'll need to round up, some in duplicate, some in triplicate, but none of these will take as much time as the first few.
Paperwork is never fun, but we are glad to be moving forward once again.