Dossier Sent

Well, it was a busy week last week for us and our dossier.

Tuesday, I received a voice mail from an unidentified man at the Vietnamese Consulate in San Francisco. He stated that he had our dossier but didn't have a return FedEx envelope and wondered what we wanted him to do. He also left a phone number.

Well 2 things here:

1) I watched the return envelope go in the outer package before it was sealed. Also a FedEx supervisor later confirmed that it was there. So obviously someone at the Consulate "misplaced" our envelope.

2) For anyone that's ever tried to contact the Consulate they know that any phone number you have, just doesn't work. It actually hangs up on you which is frustrating to say the least when you've gone through all their menus. Also, their email gets rejected every time. Well the number this man left was no different.

So...we tried faxing the Consulate, but then didn't hold our breath. Immediately we called a courier from the area that specializes in adoption deliveries (she's an adoptive mama herself). The courier was able to get our dossier back and sent it to us overnight. Thanks Jill!

So in the end it just cost us more money (ha!) and the stress of almost losing 10 months of work and thousands of dollars I'm sure was great for our hearts.

Wednesday morning the dossier arrived. I spent the rest of the day and evening making the required collated photo copies and typing up the cover sheets. Over 400 copies...yeah! Who am I kidding, I really didn't care, I was just so glad to get our dossier back.

Thursday I took Ethan to preschool, we went to the bank to get one of the complete copies of the dossier notarized, picked up Ethan, and then off to the Secretary of State Office in the Capital building in Lincoln for State seals.

Friday morning I was able to send the dossier and it's copies to our agency. It is there now. After our agency director reviews it, our dossier will go to Vietnam to be translated and finally logged in with the Department of International Adoption (DIA).