Our I-797 approval came today! It took 30 days. Woohoo! Now I just have to get it notarized and county certified.

The last piece to this puzzle is my birth certificate. I overnighted the new copy to the California Secretary of State for authentication Monday and delivery was confirmed Tuesday. Owen’s BC and our marriage certificate took the estimated 4 weeks. Hopefully, overnighting it and sending an overnight return will cut at least a week off their processing time for mine.

I should be able to have our entire dossier state certified by the GA SOS now. I can’t wait to get rid of this thing! It has been a thorn in my side for the last two months. I am soooo tired of looking at seals, stamps, signatures, dates, certifications, authentications, and affirmations! It will soon be in someone else’s hands, and hopefully, all my ”labor” will pay off!

Tomorrow we leave for a much-needed break. Hopefully, the weather will cooperate…it’s been raining today. There’s nothing worse than camping in the rain.    

Sorry…couldn’t resist this picture! LOL

Two more county certifications down, one more to go. I just might mail this last one since it’s in downtown Atlanta, and I’m really getting tired of navigating county courthouses. I’m a little nervous about letting this final document out of my sight. It’s my employment letter, and I had a helluva time getting it. The guy in the notary department in Atlanta assured me that he would take care of it. If he only knew…

I finally got a hold of a live person at the California Secretary of State yesterday. The good news is they told me there was a good possibility that there would be no problem certifying my old birth certificate since they generally keep old notary signatures on file. The bad news is they still take up to 3 – 4 weeks to process them, and there was no way to check the status of the documents I sent right now. I’m debating on whether or not I should send in the current copy of my birth certificate just in case. Or would that confuse them? You know how government workers are?!? LOL I’m still waiting on our I-797 from the USCIS…that’s likely to take 3 – 4 more weeks as well (wishful thinking?), so maybe, if I’m lucky, this will all come together around the same time. In the meantime, I’m going to ask my CHI coordinator if I can send her all my other completed dossier documents to review, so if there are any problems, I can take care of them while I’m waiting on these last couple of things.

If it were Christmas and there was one thing I could put at the top of my list to Santa, it would be my birth certificate from California’s Vital Records department. Well, guess what, even though it’s not Christmas, Santa came through! LOL My birth certificate was in the mailbox when we got home last night! Two weeks and four days after I mailed in my request! The person I spoke with when I mailed it in had told me there was a 12 week average wait to process BC requests due to budget cuts. As you can imagine, I’m thoroughly relieved. Now I need to call the Secretary of State in California tomorrow to find out if they are going to authticate the old copy I mailed. If not, I have a nice, new certified copy that I can send them. Yippee!

I have 3 more counties to go to for certifications (piece of cake), and I’m waiting on our I-797 approval from USCIS. It’s been 2 weeks since I sent that in. From what I’ve gathered, they’re taking about 4 – 6 weeks to process those. So, if everything goes smoothly, we should have our dossier completed, and hopefully, on it’s way to Ethiopia by the end of May. That’s not too far off my predicted timeline. Of course, as we know, anything can go wrong in this crazy process, so I will try to remain flexible and patient. I’m getting better at that, I think.

We completed our Basic Parenting class yesterday. Most of it was just review for me but I think it was good for Owen. We have a couple more tests to complete on the DVD set, and then we’ll be done with the required education stuff. Yay!

Now that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel with the dossier, I’m beginning to relax a little more. It’s been a really tense and anxious month for me. As hard as the waiting is going to be, at least I can fill that time with fun things like getting the nursery together and researching more about Ethiopia, rather than running myself ragged trying to get other people to do their jobs!