Monday, March 13, 2006
Passport in hand, INS application complete
So, alot has happened since my last post. Andrew's passport arrived in the mail the weekend we were moving from one apartment in our complex to another. We celebrated by treating ourselves to a steak dinner at Longhorn. We sent in our INS I-600A application. Dani sent along our completed homestudy, and we went for our fingerprints this past Friday. The fingerprinting center is seperate from the INS office I went to previousely. This was a little DMV-like office - sets of chairs in groups, but what the different groups are for you have no clue because there are no signs. The officer who checks you paperwork just tells you where to stand - you still have no clue how he's deciding where people go. Our appointment was for 9am, but we got there at 8 and got printed at 830am. They have one little form for you to fill out, then you check in with the fingerprinting clerk, and one of the fingerprinting people comes and gets you. They do the prints, a supervisor(?) comes and verifies their work and asks you some questions, and off you go. I'm going to call Officer Sandino sometime this week to "make sure" she got everything....hehe. Hopefully she will expedite our application since Marina is considered "sick." Once we get our approval letter, we can get our dossier finished up. I can't get ahold of Dani to find out where she is in that process. We sent her the remaining documents, but I never got confirmation from her that she got them ok. She then needs to get all the documents notarized and apostilled. After that....we have no clue who is going to be our translator/facilitator in country, so we don't know who will translate our dossier into Ukrainian. We can't get registered as adoptive parents until the dossier is translated and submitted to the NAC in Kyiv. We are probably going to submit it to the NAC afer the changeover in their leadership on May 1. So, our two big problems right now - money and facilitation team - but these are tied together....the amount of money we are going to need is directly related to who we chose to use for translation...the prices vary SO much. I just can't decide....you can't decide based purely on price - what if that person has no connections with NAC and can't get your documents submitted? You are out of luck at that point. I think it boils down to trust - if you trust someone, you probably trust them not to rip you off, and you trust them to make sure you get your kid.