One thing a lot of people don’t know about adopting, is there is a LOT of paperwork.
To even apply for our agency, before we could even see any children’s files, we had to fill out paperwork, provide employment verification, and lots more. Once we moved on to the homestudy, we probably turned in about 50 pages of paperwork, if not more. Our medical paperwork alone for the homestudy was about 20 pages, and that’s just one small part.
After your homestudy, you move onto the dossier, which is the actual papers that will be sent to the country you are adopting from. The dossier-compiling process is frequently called “the paper chase” because you are rushing to get so many papers, and then each of those papers needs proper state authentications (which for GA means going to two different offices to get to separate authentications). Then you need the country authentication as well. It’s a lot of papers, and can be really confusing at times, but we were able to get it all done and by the end of the month, we should officially have our dossier logged into to Vietnam’s system to be processed, which is a big deal in international adoption! We’re excited!
While we’re relieved to have that major part of the adoption process done, we still have some paperwork to go. Once we get our dossier approved, we’ll have immigration and Visa paperwork to fill out (but that seems like it will feel exciting, right?). Besides those, we’ve been working hard applying for adoption grants to help fund our adoption and each one of those takes a lot of paperwork too.
In the end, all of the paperwork is so worth it. Every page, every signature brings our little boy home!
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