Our Dossier

We are heading to the CIS office today to get our fingerprints taken. Once we have this done it will take 2 to 4 weeks to receive an approval letter from the State Dept. and then our dossier should be ready to be authenticated! This is big! The documents in the dossier all need to be notarized, sealed with a county seal (this is a California rule), certified at the Secretary of State office in Sacramento and then sent to the Consulate in San Francisco for authentication. Once all of that is complete, it is sent to Vietnam for approval. That sounds like a lot, but now that we are in process it really isn't as hard as we thought it would be.

Right now we are still in the gathering of notarized documents stage. Some of the documents arrive notarized, while others must be notarized by our traveling Notary. (She came to our doctor's office to notarize the doctor's signature.) The dates on the documents must match the date it is signed and notarized. This is not always easy to plan, but like I said we are almost done.

We are hopeful that this entire process will continue to go smoothly (two to three months, at least) Once our dossier is approved in Vietnam, we will receive our referral as soon as a child is available. Yippee!

Have a nice weekend!!