Productive Week!

Ok friends....thought I should share a bit of an update with you all!

This process has been crazy exciting and after 11 months of painstaking, slow-going preparations, things are starting to come together quickly. This process has been quite a test of our patience and faith!

This week has been very productive....
1.) We submitted our USCIS 2 weeks ago and received our biometric appointments for next week! 
2.) There are ONLY 4 more documents we are waiting on for our dossier - 2 of which are our notarized transcripts from LU. Once we receive those, we can send out a packed to VA to get apostilled! 
3.) The other 2 documents we are waiting on are our FBI clearances - they are in process.
3.) We sent out MN documents to get apostilled
4.) We only have one more local country to get notary authentications from before we drive to Albany to get our NYS documents apostilled. 
5.) We applied for an adoption loan (in some absolutely, terrifyingly, crazy high amount)
6.) Started filling out applications for grants

THIS is exciting stuff. This dossier consists of a lot of time, money, and anxiety! lol. But we are sooooo excited how close we are to completing it! Our goal is to have the dossier competed and sent to our international agency by the the end of  December. (We are hopeful we can bring our NYS documents to Albany ourselves to have them apostilled over Christmas break). 

Once our dossier is completed, we will mail it to our agency and they will submit for translation into Macedonian via a legal translation service. Once it is translated, we will make a copy of of the Macedonian version to carry with us when we travel, and THEN, our agency will submit our dossier along with our request to adopt!!! (Hopefully by early spring).

There are A LOT of unknowns about this timing and such as this is a pilot program....we are praying that all comes together smoothly! 

Please keep those positive thoughts and prayers coming!!! We are so excited. 

- Joe and Hannah