Dossier is ready

Looks like we finally have our dossier ready: today we went to Albany to put the apostilles on all the documents. All U.S. documents submitted to the Ukrainian government must be authenticated. It means that all notaries signatures first need to be authenticated at the Country Clerks Office and then apostilled at the Department of State at Albany. On Tuesday I went to the Country Clerks Office to authenticate the signatures of all the notaries on our documents, and today we drove to Albany to get the apostilles. We could've sent them by mail, but I was really afraid to send all my 16 original documents, so we've decided to go and do it in person. It's just over 3 hours drive, so it was not too bad. We were expecting to wait a long time, but as with every other stop for our other adoption paper, it was short and smooth, the workers there were very nice.

Now the big question remains - who will submit our dossier! The State Department of Adoption in Ukraine changes rules almost daily. There is a quota of 558 dossiers a year from American citizens, and the only day and time to submit a dossier is Monday from 2 to 4. There is a huge line of people wanting to submit it, and the facilitators (people hired by prospective adoptive parents to help them with paperwork in Ukraine) have to check in with this unofficial line twice a week. To make the matters worse, SDA is not accepting any new dossiers from foreign citizens this week and next week due to staff resignations there, including director, deputy directors, and others. So for now we are just waiting while my girlfriend in Odessa is trying very hard to find somebody to help us.