Paperwork Changes for Everyone Involved

We are still working on our dossier paperwork. I had a friend adopt a child from China last year, and he told me that the paperwork required is immense. I thought that we had already completed most of the paperwork prior to the dossier, and that the dossier would be just collecting those items that we had already processed. I was very wrong.


Even though we already had a physical by our doctor, the Russian government has to have it on their form. Even though we already had our homestudy and all of the licenses of the agency, we had to have each part of that document notarized. And it goes on, and on, and on........


So, not only are Bryan and I getting all of the documents re-processed and notarized, our local adoption agency has had to do the same. You would think that they would know what paperwork needs to be completed because they do this all the time, but that is not true anymore. Last year in Russia, adoption was shut down. There was a push to get Russians to adopt their own children - and it did not work. There was also a push to "repopulate" Russia - but even though they may get a bit of money or stipend for having a child last year, the reality is that people who had these children were still unable to make ends meet, so they began putting them up for adoption. The government decided to open up again, and there were many different regulations put into place. In Russia, each region has the right to request different documentation from the adoption parents. Often, a couple will come before the court with their paperwork and the judge will request more papers. If they do not request more papers, then they may see a document that they like - and then request it of the next couple that comes through their doors. So, the documents that we must fill out may or may not meet all of the judges needs. You would think there would be some type of standardization, but there is not.


That being said, our local adoption agency had all the papers that they thought we would need (according to previous year's requests). Our international agency (which was one of the first re-accredited agencies in Russia when they opened up), has a pretty good record of knowing what judges may want. When they sent us the dossier paperwork collection document, I noticed that many of the documents that our local agency gave us had to be done a bit differently. Our local agency was wonderful, and immediately responded that they would begin working on it.


So now we are SLOWLY getting our paperwork together. Bryan and I have everything together on our end - we are going to get about 1o documents notarized on Feb 28 after we do our fingerprinting. Then we will just wait for the documents that we need from all the other agencies.

We have been told that we might travel as early as 45 days after we mail off our dossier - that could be as early as late April / early May. Of course that will be our first trip, and we will not be able to travel home with our child - but, at least we will finally get to meet our child.