Try, try, try again

It has been a while since we've updated the blog and there is a lot to share. We've made significant progress in some areas and seem to be stuck in a "Groundhog Day" time loop, or a Star Trek temporal loop for others. We'll start with the positive and go from there.

First and foremost, all of our documents are back from the Chinese Embassy in Washington DC and Consulate in New York! Now for the caveat - without really thinking about it, we sent the consulate my verification of employment letter, which originated in California. As the Consulate in New York does not have jurisdiction over California documents, they sent it back letting us know we needed to send it to the Consulate in California. We sent it to California with a new money order and supporting documents but it came back yesterday stating that the notary in California needed to notarize the actual document. She had filled out a form called an All Purpose Acknowledgement which is a separate piece of paper. The Consulate didn't like that so now we need to send it back to her to get the actual letter notarized and have it filled in properly. Details, details, details...

We also had submitted our I800A to USCIS and received it back approximately a week later with a note that it was missing a page. I called USCIS and spoke with someone who was obviously not going to be able to help me and after 20 frustrating minutes of non-sense with her, she finally mentioned that her computers were down. Even if she had the ability to help me, she wouldn't have been able to look anything up! We could have saved 20 minutes of time and frustration if she mad mentioned that up front. *sigh* Julie and I reviewed and re-reviewed the form and found that we had not sent a page that was supposed to be signed by a person if they prepared the form rather than the parents. Silly us - we figured since we prepared the form we didn't need to include a page that wasn't signed but the computer that scanned our form in didn't agree. We sent it back the next morning and hoped we were done. A week later it came back from USCIS again stating that the date on the check was wrong and we needed to send a more current one. Apparently when I filled out the check I put in 02 as the year rather than 09. Julie filled out a new check and FedExed it back off to Texas. Apparently her writing is way better than mine because I logged into our checking account this morning and saw that the check had cleared so we assume we are now "in process" at USCIS!

Next steps will be to get the Letter of Verification of Employment back to CA to be notarized (again) and then send it back to the Chinese Consulate in CA for certification. We're also waiting for the USCIS to send us a letter for our fingerprinting appointment downtown. After that is completed, we'll wait for our I-797C to come back and then we get to make a copy of it, get it notarized, state certified and off to the Chinese Consulate in NY for certification. Once these stars all align, we're ready to send our dossier (all of this paperwork) to the agency and then off to China. The end of this part of the road is in sight, but we're not there yet!