An introduction to our bull"dozier"

We had the 2nd of our home study visits tonight, which went very well. We basically went over some educational materials and talked about how to began to prepare our dossier. What is a dossier, you ask? Let me educate you...Well, for starters, it is pronounced DOSS-ee-ay, and NOT at all like the tail end of "bulldozier", which is how I prefer to pronounce it, much to Kenny's dismay. The dossier is "a collection of specific documents that are sent to another country [Ethiopia, in our case] in order to process the adoption in court. In most cases these documents must be legalized, notarized, state certified or apostilled and authenticated by the appropriate Consulate or Embassy. The documents needed for a dossier vary country by country and many must be dated within a specific time frame."

So, just when we thought the paperwork was winding up, we will now take all this paperwork we have collected and have them "authenticated" at the county, state and national levels...which to my understanding, means a seal from the corresponding level will be put on each piece of paper to declare their authenticity. This is, of course, after each paper has been notarized. Then, it will be sent on to Ethiopia. We are getting dangerously close to the "waiting zone", so I'm definitely pumped to have something else to work on to help the time pass faster.

I'll update you on our status as I run around the state with our bull"dossier"...


EDITOR'S NOTE: I'm not sure my humor is totally appreciated in "blog" form, because it dawned on me as I read over this before posting, that you can't actually HEAR me saying "dossier", therefore thinking that my references to a bulldozier are actually fairly lame. I may be, in fact, fairly lame, but please humor me in my desperate attempts to create interesting and captivating titles for each of my posts in order to keep your attention... feel free to laugh with me; if you insist on laughing at me, please do it behind my back. :)