Official Business Completed

It's been a long day that started early. As soon as the kids were in school, we headed to Topeka to have our dossier's State Notaries authenticated. We had 29 documents in all, and the State attaches two pages to the top of each one. When we walked into the Secretary of State building we met up with the same woman, Georgia Lott, who has done authentications for all three of our adoptions now. She's an older, heavy-set woman with glasses who is as sweet as can be. We were so happy to see her because after all these years feels like a dear friend. She informed us that she couldn't authenticate our County issued marriage certificate, but directed us to where we could get a new one. We zoomed over there (across the street), obtained that in 15 minutes and zoomed back to her office where she had all the authenticating completed. At $7.50 a document, the bill was paid with money I earned doing child care, which felt great :) Thank you, Baby Ceci!

After that rendevoux, we headed to the copy shop making 2 copies of the whole dossier. Each page was copied individually (29 documents with anywhere from 3 pages to 10 pages each). And the monotonous stapling...urrrgh. Of course, it's all a joy when we're this far along. Presently, Daniel is driving to Kansas City to authenticate the State seals on his and Sorin's Missouri birth certificates. When I have those in hand we'll be overnighting it all by FedEx to our agency.

Tomorrow we'll officially be a Waiting Family, and we may very well have our referral in 5-12 weeks!