There are tremendous amounts of paperwork to get for an adoption in order to create a dossier. I'll post more on that later. Most of it requires official originals, which must be notarized. These must then be taken to the Secretary of State to receive an official appostille, meaning the Secretary of State certifies that the notary is valid. Once that is complete, all of this is mailed to the Vietnamese embassy to have them authenticate the Secretary of State's stamp. Once this giant stack of paperwork is sent back, you send it to your adoption agency, and it goes off to Vietnam. In theory if all was fine with said dossier, we should have had our referral and been to and from Vietnam before Tet week (which starts Feb 17). However after all of this stamping and authenticating, and after checking multiple times, our I-171H form "didn't arrive." (The I-171H form is yet another story). I personally don't believe this as I have 5 copies of the dossier that were made at Fedex/Kinko's right before I stuffed the mailer with the dossier. The adoption agency received the dossier. Their Vietnam counterparts recieved it. The orphanage received it, and we received our referral. But at the last minute the document suddenly "didn't arrive." Since they received every other document, and all the documents travelled in a bundle, this sounds like lost-in-process to me. Nevertheless it's not to be found. So we have had to repeat the notarization, apostille, and authentication process for this document. We needed to send updated medicals (getting those are their own story) and criminal-records-statement from the local chief of police (the easiest part to get by far), so we would have repeated this chase of notarizations, certifications, and authentications anyway, but still it was frustrating to lose this document. Its loss means we probably won't travel till March, rather than February. This week I got a certified copy of the original, notarized it, and apostilled it, and tomorrow I will FedEx it so that we can finally get our travel date assigned. We think 3-4 weeks, and we'll have this. I'm going to encourage Julia to post a story about our freaking out about taking care of a baby once we realized "What do we know about taking care of a baby!" or maybe "The reason to NEVER use a UPS store to overnight anything critical."
