The paperwork nightmare

Well, the good news is that our facilitator (who we really like) is very meticulous and wants to make sure all documents in our dossier are in order so that SDA (State Department of Adoptions) can't reject them. The bad news is that we had to make corrections to several documents. Of course it's not that bad, it's just another cycle of the paperwork: notarize, certify at the County Clerk's office, send to Albany to apostille. Sergey (0ur facilitator in Kiev) helped us to rewrite our cover letter, made changes to the Power of Attorney documents, found an incorrect birth date in the Home Study and asked to submit a separate copy of our social worker's license. Apparently, NY State issues a so-called "Registration Certificate" for all professions (doctors, nurses, social workers, etc). It really means "license", which is clear to us, but not clear to bureaucrats at SDA. Luckily, my social worker was very cooperative and gave me the notarized copy immediately. I certified all 6 new/updated documents in the Country Clerk office today after work and raced to the post office to send them overnight to the Albany in order to get the apostilles. Hopefully they'll process them soon, so we'll be able to send everything to Ukraine (so far they worked with our scanned documents only).

It's interesting how everything is more expensive in NY State, even document certification. It costs $3 to certify a notary signature at the Country Clerk's office, and $10 to issue an apostille at the Department of State. All our documents but one were issued in NY State. The only document out of state is Oleg's employment letter, since the consulting company he works for is located in Michigan. Guess what? There is no need to certify a notary signature at the Country Clerk's office, and the cost for the apostille is only $1, which is 13 times cheaper than in NY State :)