Dossier progress

We are making progress on our dossier! We had our first meeting with our home study social worker, Therese, last Saturday (7/25) to discuss the process, documents and a lot of other stuff. She is great and we seemed to get along nicely which is good since she's writing the home study. :)

We attacked the week with everything we've got to get the dossier really rolling. Monday morning we sent out letter to our children's pediatricians for a medical statement, we sent out forms for our guardians to state that they would take Lil' Bubba if something happened and we got our fingerprints knocked out. We have to have BCI-I (Bureau of Criminal Identification & Investigation as well as FBI background checks. The place we went was able to do both at the same time so a 2-fer-1 with that visit!

We've sent copies of all of our birth certificates, marriage license, tax form, medical and auto insurance information and other OH specific documents to Therese for her file. We've also had to complete a pretty detailed financial analysis and prepare the forms for both the China dossier as well as the OH file.

Tuesday we went to the local Sheriff's office to have a letter signed and notarized (of course) that says we are not criminals and don't have any outstanding warrants, etc. While we were waiting we saw our local Sheriff and said "Hi!" We knew our time was about up when Veronica was running across the room - kids that age don't walk anywhere, they run - and she tripped earning a nice 6 inch rug burn on her forearm. As luck would have it, our paperwork was just being handed to us so we could leave. The timing was perfect!

Wednesday we got the verification of employment from Ron's work though that in and of itself introduces a new wrinkle as it'll have to be notarized in California so we're looking into that.

We had our fire department come out to inspect the house and fill out that paperwork on Thursday. I fully expected one of the new guys to drive his car over and do it for us since it doesn't sound like it'd be as much fun as fighting fires. Nope - we look out and see a fire engine backing into our driveway and 3 people come to do the inspection, including the chief! We love Porter-Kingston Fire Department! They came out 40 minutes after I called for the inspection - I was expecting days if not weeks!

We just bought a new HP scanner/printer/copier/fax/who knows what else it does machine a few weeks ago and it has paid for itself in duplex (2 sided) copies, scans and faxes for this process and we're just at the beginning! We've probably sent over 20 pages in faxes this week alone!

We went to get more paperwork notarized Saturday and dropped them in the mail to Therese so now we only have our autobiographies to do and medical physicals for Ron and Julie and we'll be done with our part of the home study! Therese let us know that the BCI&I and FBI checks came back clean so we're good on that end too!

Whew! Long post huh? Guess these are easier if we do them a bit more frequently. ;)