Documents are done!

All of the documents for the dossier have been collected! Now we just lack a completed home study (which will probably be done in January), and we can send it out to Ethiopia.

Here's some of what we collected over the past 2 months for the dossier:

• Local police clearance
• Passports photo page
• Birth certificates
• Marriage certificate
• Medical clearance letters from all of our doctors
• Family photo page
• Employment letters from our many employers
• Letter of good standing from our bank
• Tax returns
• Letter of intent to Ethiopia
• Letter of commitment to post-adoption process with Ethiopia
• 3 letters of reference

It doesn't seem like a lot, but each letter had to be notarized and on official letterhead.  We also had another set of documents that out homestudy required, including:

• A legal will (this was NOT cheap!)
• well-water test
• pastor letter
• 3 more references
• family history, biographies of ourselves, ect.
• background check and finger prints
• financial information
• pet records
• immunization records
• letter from out landlord

I'm sure I missed something, because Micah really did all the work. While I've been researching how to care for African girl's hair and trying to diversify Pearl's collection of dolls and DVDs to reflect our future trans-racial family, he's been doing the more essential things...like making sure our pets don't have rabies and our water isn't poison.  We all have our gifts.

So here are the next steps:

1. finish the home study
2. add the home study document to the dossier and bring it to the state of CT for authentication
3. hire a courier service to bring the dossier to Washington, DC for authentication
4. our agency gets the dossier
5. we pay a massive balance with our agency to send out the dossier to Ethiopia
6. We wait 9-12 months for a referral of a child
7. We get a referral and accept it
8. we wait 2-4 months for a court date, and make travel plans, get vaccines
9. We travel to Ethiopia for 8-10 days for the court date
10. We adopt Violet in Ethiopia, if the court date goes well
11. We leave Ethiopia without her
12. We return to Ethiopia  in another 2 months or so to go the the US Embassy appointment and bring her home
13. Fly home for 18 hours with our child, who we've only met twice, who's never been on an airplane 
14. Come home and re-adopt Violet in the U.S.
15. Continue with post-adoption process

While this is a daunting to-do list, nothing terrifies me more than #13.  If I only have one thing go smoothly in this process, please let it be #13.