Final dossier paper chase? – we hope September 30, 2009

I had a nice conversation with the Colombia Dossier specialist at our adoption agency yesterday.  We are so close to submitting our dossier it doesn’t feel real.  Granted the guestimated wait time is 12-18 months after Colombia translates it and our orphanage approves our dossier – but can’t wait to be officially WAITING!  

 

I’m sure once we are officially waiting I will think every call from a 651 area code is THE CALL telling us we have been matched – even long before the wait time is up. 

{THE CALL = when the country specialist from the adoption agency calls you to say you have been matched with a child(ren).  You get all the info they know about the children (i.e. Referral information), picture(s), medical reports, history.   You take that information and decide if you will accept the referral. Which in most cases, you always do unless there is some medical issue that you don’t feel you can handle. THE CALL is one of the most exciting and emotional moments in adoptive parents lives.}

We have our final meeting with the psychologist Tomorrow, 10/01/09, which we should receive the long awaited psychological evaluation that is needed for our Colombian Dossier.  

 

I have one personal reference letter that I should  have by the end of the week.

 

Still waiting on Jason’s Employment Verification which we are hoping to have this week or early next week.

 

Need to take pictures of the house, us, and our family this week.

 

Need to copy our I800 A and write it is a true certified original copy and have both of us sign the copy and have notarized. (WE KEEP THE ORIGINAL)

 

Finished our Introduction letter to our Orphanage yesterday. YIPPEE!  I was really worried about getting it done and feeling good about it.  We are finally there!

 

Our adoption agency said they could get our MN documents apposiled so I will be sending them the majority of our original dossier documents early next week.  Hoping to have EVERYTHING by then, so it will be complete.

 

Everything else is done.   We will have to wire funds to the person in Colombia who will be translating our documents.  I do not have that info yet.

 

Later this week or early next week I am going to scan our entire dossier minus photo’s and send it to the Dossier Specialist so she can start prepping the documents she needs to do.

 

We haven’t been matched with infant or children yet so I obviously don’t have photo’s yet.. Instead I have lots and lots of checklists of things to do to look at. 

 

Someday I hope I will be able to get rid of all my checklists and have pictures of children to put in their place.

Monkeys and green paint September 29, 2009

 

I purchased a new sewing machine that has amazing embroidery abilities.  I also invested in a monkey embroidery CD with 33 different monkeys just waiting for me to embroider them.   Above is the sample monkey I embroidered on a cloth diaper a couple weeks ago.  It is 5″ x 7″ and took my machine almost two hours to embroider. 

The plan is to embroider a bunch of monkeys on some curtains I purchased for our children’s room and paint the walls a coordinating green.  I doubt we will be able to get this completed this weekend.  But I am sure going to try.

It’s fun to finally be able to prepare.  We need to take some pictures of the house and the children’s room for our dossier.  The room doesn’t need to be completed, but I would like to show that we have at least started preparing for them.

I-800A Approval – YIPPEE! September 23, 2009

I was delighted to receive our I-800A approval in our mail last night.   I thought it would be at least another week since we just had our biometrics done on 9/16.  It is dated 9/17 so it appears we were approved the next day.

It came in a standard legal size envelope from Homeland Security.  I was nervous opening it up, as I was hoping they weren’t going to request any more info or that it wasn’t a form letter saying something about receiving it and they would mail our approval in X number of days..   I had no need to worry.  Our I-800A process was expensive and felt complicated but really wasn’t bad at all.  It’s so nice to have something go smoothly in our adoption process. 

Our dossier is almost complete.  We just need to spend the next two weeks getting the child(rens) room looking a bit more like a kids room, take a bunch of pictures, finish our Intro letter to our Orphanage while we wait for our last Psychologist appointment on 10/1/09.

I will contact our adoption agency later this week or early next week about getting our MN docs apposiled. They said they could have it done overnight.   (Picture of CT apposile seal below. )  If all goes well we should be able to send in our dossier in the first two weeks in October if not sooner! YIPPEE..

CT Apposile Seal picture

A few weeks ago I purchased a 3 inch wide 3 ring binder.  I wasn’t told to do so but am assuming we need one for our dossier to be sent to Colombia.  I resisted the urge to be boring and purchased a neon green binder!  It was a nice and expensive one (about $17).  I also purchased heavy duty plastic paper covers and tabs so I can label everything to make it easy for review.  My thought is that I want everything to be as nice and easy going for the orphanage in Colombia when it comes to reviewing our binder.  I am hoping that they are okay that we bought this binder and that it is green.  My thought is that it will help our binder stand out from the rest and make them like us.  Silly I know, but if there is anything I can do to make the process better I am going to try it.

Brain drain and Biometrics yesterday! September 17, 2009

We took the day off yesterday to get some very important adoption stuff done.  We had received our appointment notification for our Biometrics (Needed for our I800A approval) to be done on 9/16 at noon, so I thought we may as well take the day off and take our MMPI (psych evaluation test) the same day.   We knew it would be hectic but it all needed to get done, so why waste a moment.

 

The day started out with getting up at 7am. For us that is sleeping in on a work day.

We were out the door at 8am and stopped for a quick breakfast/Ice coffee break at the Holiday gas station.  Definitely not Caribou or Starbucks but a fraction of the cost and much closer to our house.   We both had a large Ice Coffee and Jason had a couple small breakfast sandwiches and I had a mini omelet taco thing is the only way I could describe it and a power bar. 

 

Picture of Jason looking ever so awake.  He really wasn’t feeling like getting his picture taken but I was trying to document the day.

 Come on don’t look so serious JASON!

 We arrived at the psychologist’s office a few minutes early and we sipped our ice coffees and flipped through a couple of National Geographic Magazines.

 

We started the MMPI test at 9:15am.  We were each given a private office to take the test in.  Jason chose the office with Action Figures toys.  (He is a Toy collector, so I wasn’t surprised).

 

The test was 567 questions and we had to leave at about 11am to make it to our biometrics appointment.  We were told it takes most people 1.5 -3 hours to complete the test and you have to take it in one sitting and cannot take it home to complete. We were each given two #2 pencils and we started scribbling in little circles!  (Just like when we were kids in school)

 

 

I didn’t know what to expect but I the questions were rather tricky.  You could only answer True or False.  Some were easy.

 

I love my Mother.   TRUE  

 

I would like to be a Florist.    FALSE

 

Often the way the questions were worded made me need to reread them to make sure I was answering the question correctly. 

 

I always never feel anxious in crowds.   (I always… NEVER?)    TRUE

 

The voices in my head tell me what to do.   (The voices… where are the option to say I don’t hear voices in my head?  There isn’t an option for that.)   FALSE

 

Peculiar odors come from me.   (WHAT?  I guess any odor that comes from me wouldn’t be peculiar…)   FALSE

 

Many of the questions were so bizarre I wondered who answers yes to them.

 

People oftener (yes they use the “word” OFTENER constantly) think I have a drinking problem but I know I don’t.     – FALSE

 

Spirits and ghosts control my actions.   FALSE

 

I dread standing in line.  (DREAD… I wouldn’t say I enjoy standing in line, do some people enjoy it?)   FALSE

 

 

Food tastes the same.  FALSE

 

I awake up refreshed seldomly.   FALSE

 

We joked around a lot about the questions on the test for the rest of the day.  They say you cannot fail the test but you can invalidate it if you contradict your answers. 

Many questions were the same just asked 5 – 10 different ways.

 

I really don’t understand how theses questions can tell anyone about my personality. Unless someone has serious issues with hearing voices, depression, or is just a threat to society in general.  I’m not a psychologist so I am sure there is way more to the test than what it appears to be on the surface.   We did both feel quite drained after the test.  I kept feeling like they were trying to trick me on the questions.  There were a lot of double negative and I always never… (have problems sleeping, feel sick, have a headache, hate animals, forget where I left my belongings, take things that do not belong to me, hope the bad guy gets away) and other random questions like that.  So even though your brain numbs out after a couple hundred questions you have to make sure you don’t go to quickly and miss the NEVER or DO NOT in any question.     Plus since it was just one long bubble sheet with over 500 questions separate from the answer book I skipped a question accidently a couple times and had to go back and fix it.  I really hope I didn’t miss one I may have answered incorrectly by accident.

 

The Psychologist sends in our tests and should have the results back in time for our final meeting to review them on 10/01/09.

 

 

We left for  ST. Paul to have our Biometrics done at about 11:15am.  There was almost no traffic, even with a couple wrong turns we still made it there in 30 minutes (15 minutes before our appointment).  I was shocked that the location was part of a strip mall and it just said Appointment Center on the outside.   I thought this was some massive official thing we had to do with homeland security.  The forms they send us are so official I didn’t expect it to feel like an appointment at the DMV.

Make sure to bring your I797-C Notice of Action form with you and leave your Cell phone and cameras in the car – as they are not allowed in the building.

 

We were all ready for long lines and a couple hour process.  We were in and out in 15 minutes!  There were a couple people ahead of us and a couple behind.  You start out by giving your Notice of Action form and your Drivers Licenses to the Guard (who was just a regular guy at a desk – didn’t look like he guarded anything).  

 

He gave us a form to complete… REALLY basic form, Name, Address, place of birth, and any previous names…  Then we took that to the receptionist. Who clipped a plastic tag with a number to it and pointed to some typical uncomfortable plastic row of chairs behind her and said take a seat.  Then I sat and she almost barked at me telling me to sit in the chair at the end.  I guess the seats were the line, but I didn’t know that.  Everyone behind us knew to sit in the line because they all heard her.  Why you need plastic numbers and need to sit in a line I don’t know, but they have their system and it all worked out very smoothly so I guess it works well.

 

I was called up and they had me sit while the a woman typed in my info for a couple minutes, then she took my fingerprints on a machine very similar to the one they used to do our fingerprints a few weeks ago.  Then she stamped our I 797-C forms as a receipt that we had it done.  I think that is just incase we never get the results.

 

I believe it normally takes another week or two to get our approved I800A form in the mail.  So I am hoping we will have everything by 10/1/09 to submit our Dossier to Colombia.

Links to Colombia pictures September 1, 2009

It has been a while since I posted anything about Colombia.. I haven’t stopped researching it just haven’t thought about posting anything about it lately..

Here are some fun links that have some great Colombia pictures. http://www.medellincolombiatours.com/photo.html

http://www.traveljournals.net/pictures/colombia/medellin/

http://www.lacasamedellin.com/medellin/main.php

http://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotos-g297478-w2-Medellin.html#18553121

http://www.pbase.com/goosekirk/colombia&page=2

http://travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide-482585-medellin_vacations-i-action-pictures#OmgPhoid=1

We also saw an Anthony Bourdain’s No reservations on Colombia a few weeks ago… We were excited about going to Colombia before but after seeing this we really felt we had a much better idea of the feel of Colombia.  It is so beautiful, full of Art, and wonderful people I’m estatic to be able to spend some time there and soak up our children’s birth culture. 

http://anthony-bourdain-blog.travelchannel.com/read/colombia-vacation-wonderland

 

Just when you think you are almost there… September 1, 2009

more little bumps pop up in the road… I’ve learned to expect this with the adoption process.  Nothing major has gone on we were just racing to get our dossier done for Colombia and I wanted it have it sent in this week but that’s not going to happen now.  It will probably be another month..

 

The psychologist that said he could to our psychological assessment (required for our dossier) decided the assessment was more than he could do when Jas0n showed up at the appointment and the psychologist finally looked at the paperwork detailing out what we needed.  To say I felt frustrated would be putting it mildly when I got the call on my drive over for my appointment (which was supposed to be right after Jason’s on 8/26).  Luckily the Psychologist we made the appointment with was able to find someone else who was actually able to do it for us.  It will take 2-4 weeks to complete from our appointment – which they couldn’t get us in for two weeks… So our new appointments are on 9/9/09 (hopefully all those nines are a good sign)… We have 2 appointments each and than one together to review the results.  The first appointment is an hour or so meeting with each of us separately, next appointment we need to take the MMPI (told it takes about 1.5 hour to complete), than the final appointment is to review the report the psychologist will be submitting.  

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory(MMPI) is one of the most frequently used personality tests in mental health. The test is used by trained professionals to assist in identifying personality structure and psychopathology.

I thought it was going to be a meeting each and than a week or two to put together the report but I guess that is too easy…

Also we finally received our I797-c – notice of action that our I800A was received and we received our appointments (individual letters) which will be on 9/16 at noon.  The notice said they received our I800A on 8/10 so our appointment is just over a month later… I’m always hoping things are completed faster in adoption but everything takes longer than I think it will. 

We received our apposilled documents back from CT.  They send a cover letter and a groovy looking gold steal on it for each document.  CHSFS said they could apposille our MN documents overnight once ready. 

We received 2/3 personal reference letters and should have the last one this week.  

 

Today or Thursday I’m going to drop by and pick up a new certified birth certificate for me on my way home from work.  They are only open late (until 6) two nights a week and I am hardly in the neighborhood by then.  So I should have that soon….

 

I started working on our introduction letter to our private orphanage last weekend.  Not really sure what to write but so far it sounds okay.

 

I just need to make some curtains for the kids/babies room and we are planning on painting it this weekend.  Currently it is our computer/extra room.  I don’t believe it needs to be all set-up as a kids room but I do want to get started on it and make it look closer to ready.  Right now it is brick red, which doesn’t work for a child’s room.

I need to take pictures of our home and us and label them for our dossier.

 We are also still waiting for them to send us our FBI clearances… Hopefully we will get these soon.

I think once I get all of the above completed we will be set…