We Are Registered!!

I got an e-mail from our caseworker that our dossier was registered with the MOJ (Ministry of Justice) on March 30th. We have our registration number and we're "officially" waiting now. It only took 20 days for the dossier to get translated and registered. That's fast!!

Dossier in Bulgaria

Our dossier was delivered to its destination in Bulgaria via Fed Ex on Tuesday morning. It took less than a week to get there. It's nice to know that our paperwork is at least in the right country now.

Our dossier is currently being translated. It usually takes three to four weeks for this to be completed. After the dossier has been translated, the translation will be authenticated by the MFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs). This process can take up to four weeks. Once this has been done, it will be sent to the MOJ (Ministry of Justice) where we will be officially registered. And then we wait...

Finished!!

After spending a few weeks gathering the remaining documents and making three trips to the Secretary of State's office, our dossier is officially finished and is ready to be submitted to our agency. They will look it over, and if everything is done correctly, it will be on its way to Bulgaria. The timing worked out perfectly since we were planning to use our tax refund to cover the payment that gets submitted with our dossier. That money will come tomorrow, just in time to mail everything to our caseworker. Once the dossier is in Bulgaria, it will be translated and then sent to the MOJ (Ministry of Justice). The MOJ meets regularly to match children with their new parents. We will probably wait about a year from the time we are registered, although it could be more or less time. I'll post an update once we are registered.

One Step Closer

We received our I-797C (I-171H) last Thursday. This form is issued by the USCIS and allows us to adopt two children from Bulgaria and to bring them back to the United States. We weren’t expecting the form to arrive until mid-February, so it was a huge surprise to see it so soon. Now that we have that form, we’ve been working extra hard to finish the rest of our dossier. We’ve done most of the work and are just waiting on everything to come back to us so we can head to the Secretary of State’s office to have it all apostilled. We’re still waiting on some paperwork from our home study agency, both of our employment letters, and our updated FBI clearances. It seems to be going okay so far, and we’re hoping to send our completed dossier to our caseworker in California sometime next month.

A Quick Update

It's been a couple of months since I've updated this blog, mostly because not much has been happening. We did get fingerprinted again at the Indianapolis USCIS office in early December. We expect our I-171H form to arrive sometime in February. We have officially started working on our dossier so everything will be ready when the last form arrives. It should not take too long to put everything together since we're getting really good at adoption paperwork. So for now, we're filling out forms, requesting employment letters, verifying bank files, and being checked for infectious diseases. If all goes as planned, our dossier should be ready to go in six to eight weeks.