Minor Changes

After getting some more clarification yesterday on what needed to be fixed in our dossier, we ended up with 7 documents that needed minor changes.  Fortunately, a few of them were so minor we have been able to completely fix three of them already (at no cost!!), possibly four. We are just waiting to hear back from our agency's staff in Ukraine to see if the changes we made on the fourth one are acceptable.  We decided we would send things via email to them now before mailing everything, just to make sure we've done it completely correct this time! :)  After that we have only one more document that we are responsible for fixing and then will need to wait on other agencies for the last two.  But for tonight we are feeling positive and much less overwhelmed then we were two nights ago.  We remain hopeful that we will have everything fixed and ready to resubmit to our agency next week.  The ups and downs in this journey are certainly incredible at times- and we still have a long way to go!

Hurdles Before Submission

One thing is for sure- the adoption journey is NOT an easy journey!!  After a week and a half of so much coming together so quickly, today we were hit with another hurdle.  Our agency received our completed dossier last Friday and after their review yesterday, they let us know that everything looked to be great!  Today we got word that our agency's staff in Ukraine wanted minor changes made on several of our documents because, as we've been told countless times, Ukraine is extremely picky on how documents are prepared.  Our program director was even unsure about a few of the changes they were requesting so is waiting for more clarification before we start on the changes.  Right now we ask for prayers that these changes will either end up not being a problem after all or will be very simple to fix without costing us too much time and money.  We are still praying that our completed dossier will be submitted to Ukraine by the end of the month and trusting that God will, once again, get us over this hurdle.  In the meantime we have learned to go with the flow and will hopefully have good news to share in the next couple of days!

Dossier Update- COMPLETE!

Our dossier is officially in the mail!  The last few days have been a whirlwind of miracles.  During our phone consultation with our program director on Friday, we found out we needed to update one document for each of us, just to make sure it was dated as close to submission as possible.  We immediately contacted the person we needed to have update this document which wasn't a problem, but then we still needed to find a traveling notary who could notarize it as soon as possible and then send it off to the state capital to get an apostille.  And we were still waiting on our background checks to come back with the apostilles as well, which, as of Monday, looked to still be a ways out since our payment hadn't even been processed yet.  Then God began to work in miraculous ways.  We were able to find a notary who could notarize the documents for us on Monday, After picking up the notarized documents we came home to find our background checks in the mail (in the self-addressed, stamped envelope we had sent them with, but with no return post-mark on it...).  Eric was able to leave work a few minutes early and take our updated, notarized documents to the state capital for same-day apostilles on Tuesday.  We had been praying for well over a month that we would be able to submit our dossier by Valentine's Day, even though that seemed impossible the closer it got.  But God moved in many ways, had His hand on our documents, and we had every document completed on the day we prayed for.  Today our dossier went out in the mail.  It will first go to our agency for them to look over and then, if everything looks good, be submitted to Ukraine, hopefully sometime next week.  

Please pray with us that there won't be any documents that we need to redo and that Ukraine will accept it right away.  Please also continue to pray with us that we will have the finances as we need them.  Now that our dossier is complete we are likely only a few months away from traveling, but still have about $13,000 more in adoption fees, not including travel costs.  This seems so overwhelming to us at times but seeing how God just worked a few more miracles these last couple days reminds us how He called us to this journey and will continue to work throughout it.  If you feel led to support our adoption financially you can view our YouCaring page at the link in the upper right hand corner of this page or our Just Love Coffee fundraiser through the link below that.  Additionally, donations can be mailed directly to our agency with our name attached (MLJ Adoptions, 617 E North St. Indianapolis, IN 46204) and are tax deductible. We are so grateful for all of your prayers and your support as each day brings us closer to finding our little one!

 

Dossier Update- Almost Complete!

We are officially waiting on only ONE document (for each of us) to come back with an apostille!!  We received all of our certified and notarized documents a couple of weeks ago and immediately got them sent back out in the mail for apostilles.  We got our last few documents back from Washington this last Saturday with, unfortunately, the wrong kind of authentication on each one.  Fortunately, it was a simple fix that we were able to take care of in person today.  This means that 43 out of 45 documents are officially prepared, twice, and copied, twice.  We are only waiting on our FBI background checks to come back with apostilles from Washington D.C., which we are praying will be any day now.  Since that is the very last thing we are waiting on, we have scheduled a phone consultation with our program director for this Friday to go through everything before we mail one complete official dossier, one complete copied dossier, and one complete digital copy of our dossier to our agency.  They will then go through it in person to make sure we have prepared all of the documents correctly and if we have, submit it to Ukraine to be translated and submitted to their government.

Please continue to pray that we have prepared all of these documents correctly the first time, as well as that our background checks will come back to us this week so that everything can be submitted to our agency by early next week.  And as always, please continue to pray for the financial piece of this journey.  We still have a long ways to go financially, but know that God will continue to provide what we need, as we need it.

Trying to get all of the piles organized!!