Dossier

Back to my playing catch-up. So, the next step in our adoption process after the homestudy was complete is getting the dossier ready to send to Holt, who then sends it onto Ethiopia. If you think of it this way, the homestudy and USCIS paperwork (explained more later) is for our government, while the dossier is for the Ethiopian government. Luckily, we could work on both at the same time since both require a medical check and some information from our employers. The dossier is more elaborate and therefore, time-consuming.

By the time that we received our approved homestudy (5/14), we had nearly all of the paperwork complete on our dossier. We only had to get our dossier and POA (Power of Attorney) state certified and then we were good to go. So, come Monday afternoon, with the enthusiasm of a young child, I bounded off to the State Department Building in Springfield. I left 30 minutes later frustrated and grumpy.

One of our notaries had used her middle initial to sign and it was also on her stamp, however when she registered, she applied using only her first and last name. One simple mistake, yet it caused a world of headache. Our homestudy was state certified and ready to mail, as well as all of our other paperwork for the dossier, but we weren't able to mail it, because we couldn't get the POA state certified. UGH!!!!!!