Dossier Update

Dossier: (doss-ee-ay) a file containing detailed records on a particular person or subject; this term refers to a set of appropriately authenticated and translated legal documents which are used in international adoption cases to process the adoption of a child in its own country by the adoptive parents, or for the adoptive parents to obtain the legal custody or guardianship of the child in the foreign court, so the child can be brought by the adoptive parents to the United States for adoption; a ridiculously crazy amount of paperwork requiring a million signed and notarized documents pertaining to Dave and Emiley, containing just about everything short of our kidneys (ok, you caught me, the last definition is made-up)

After months and months of paperwork, we have completed our seemingly endless pile of official documents and forms...well, for now at least. :) Each minute of free time in the Marriott family has been consumed with this paper chase. I am not sure we're gonna know what to do with ourselves now. I jest.

Dave and I are giddy with excitement! On Thursday, we printed off the last of our forms that must be included in our dossier. I spent much of the afternoon getting the papers in order, reading and re-reading exactly how each one of them must be signed, dated and notarized before submission. I taped on our pictures to our identification page:

It's surreal. It's just about official. Father, David Marriott. Mother, Emiley Marriott. I like the ring of that! :) I think this is my favorite page that is included in our dossier.

On Friday, we collected our last reference letter for the dossier. We booked it to the bank to get each of the required forms, letters and documents officially notarized. Once each was ready, we scanned them in and e-mailed them to our adoption coordinator from our agency to double check our work.

We're hoping to hear back from her by Monday or Tuesday that everything looks great. Then it's 6 more copies of everything (5 for our agency to use and send to Ethiopia, 1 for our personal records). We'll mail it out to our agency and then it's off to Ethiopia for translation!

This is a very, very, very exciting day in this process!!!!! This is the milestone that we've been working toward since we began. Now we just wait to be matched with our little boy!