Slogging through the Paperwork Jungle

I've had a yucky week...and a half.  It's absolutely February's fault.  (Oh how I despise you, second month of the year.)  I admit, the snow-covered world outside my window is breathtakingly gorgeous.  And I love it...for the entire month of December.  And January.  By the time February gets here, my toes are itching for flip-flops, and I just want to go camping.  Whoever decided to make February the shortest month of the year is one of my heroes.  Seriously.

It hasn't helped that all the brilliant progress we were making on our paperwork has come to a complete standstill.  Instead of trekking through the paperwork jungle, I pretty sure I'm getting strangled by an anaconda.  Or drowning in quicksand.

When I last posted, our U.S. Immigration application had zipped across the country and been received at their lockbox.  The next step is for them to send us an appointment time to be fingerprinted.  (Because, you know, our fingerprints have gone all spy ninja since the 14 times we were fingerprinted for our last adoption.  Just sayin'.)  In spite of my dramatic daily sprint to the mailbox, the mailman hasn't come through for me yet.

So...that stinks.

While I wait ever-so impatiently for that appointment letter, I've been trying to finish up a few other loose ends with the rest of our dossier.  Last week I collected all of our out-of-state documents and prepped them to go to a courier in D.C.  Both our birth certificates and our marriage certificate are from out-of-state, so they can't be processed by the Chin*se Consulate that oversees our state.  Instead they have to go through the Chin*se Embassy in D.C., which requires that they first go through the U.S. Department of State in D.C.  (Complicated, I know.)  

So far, these documents had been ordered from our birth counties and then sent back (or carried in by my lovely mom) for authentication from the Secretary of State in our birth states.  I had then wrestled them into a package with two checks, a money order, a request form for the Consulate, copies of our passports, a cover letter for the courier, two sets of copies of each document, and a return F*dEx envelope.  (I managed all this in spite of having a total breakdown getting a little anxious when F*dEx.com would not open on either computer in the church office as 5:00pm rapidly approached.)

Our three little documents flew off to D.C. overnight.  The next day, someone posted in one of my adoption groups that birth certificates and a marriage certificate are no longer required for families who have previously adopted from Ch*na.  I frantically called my agency, and they confirmed this change.  Really?  I mean, I'm all for less paperwork; but I would have loved, loved, loved to get that tidbit of information 24 hours earlier.  Thankfully, I contacted the courier in time so our two checks, our money order, our birth certificates, our marriage certificate, and our return F*dEx label are now flying back from D.C. after their fun little field trip.

Not to be deterred, on Monday I collected all our other documents to go to the Consulate that oversees our state.  I printed/copied/dug up pretty much all the same things I had sent to D.C. and read over the courier's instructions 47 times.  One line said, "Please check your authentication pages from your Secretary of State, as they do make mistakes."  I chuckled at this one.  Surely that wouldn't be necessary.  I have total confidence in my Secretary of State to correctly print the notary's name and the date the paper was signed on the authentication sheet.

But, I'm a tad OCD.  So I checked.  And two of our nine documents were authenticated incorrectly.  The authentication sheets list the woman who signed the document instead of the notary.  Ugh.  I guess I'll be taking a little field trip to the Secretary of State's office.

So, tonight I need to remind myself that these are all all small things.  They're easily fixed.  When it comes to bringing home our girl, I can drive to the Secretary of State one. more. time.  Or fill out one more paper.  Or send one more F*dEx.  I need to ditch my stinky drowning-in-quicksand attitude.

In that light, seven of our ten documents are headed in the right direction. My mailman will show up with that fingerprint letter sometime soon.  And February?  Well, it's already 14% over.