Ok, not really. For those of you non-international adoption obsessed fans, here's the definition of Dossier.
dossier
Pronunciation: \ˈdos-yā, do-sē-ā\
Function: noun
Etymology: French, bundle of documents labeled on the back, dossier, from dos back, from Latin dorsum
Date: 1880
: a file containing detailed records on a particular person or subject
My Dossier is currently en route to Fort Worth Texas, to our agency, Gladney. It left portland at 8:34pm tonight, to be exact and should be delivered to our agency tomorrow morning. It will visit with Natalie, our caseworker, for a few days, and then move on to Washington D.C to be authenticated. Then it will go to the Ethiopian Embassy...then, to Ethiopia! We hope to be on the waitlist sometime next week. (We are officially placed, when Natalie sends it off to the courier in WA DC)
(my helper, above)It was bittersweet to send of my french friend. I made her pretty, since I had to look at her so much. It was really weird to box up my stack of paperwork that I've labored over for months, and trust some stranger to make sure that it gets where I NEED it to be. I almost wanted him to personally promise me that nothing would happen to it! What if the driver spills his Pepsi on it and it soaks through the box, and wrecks all of my original papers? What if the plane crashes and goes down in flames? I mean, even though it's insured...it would cost me time and money to do it all over again!! (Um, yes, I know, it sounds a little obsessive).
Nevertheless, me and Dossier have become close. Very close. I almost know exactly the wording of each item , how many pages it has, when the notary will expire. How much it cost me to get it, authenticate it, and ship each item.
It feels like a huge load off to say BUH-BYE to her. Hayden helped me make my final copies (he made sure that each paper came out that big machine that makes "coffees". He made the final hand off to the FedEx guy. It was a big moment...the guy looked at me weird when I said, don't put it in the box yet, I need to get my camera and take a picture, this is a BIG day!"
We celebrated at Chevy's with a tasty strawberry raspberry margarita and tasty eats with our family. I felt that I deserved a tasty relaxing beverage after hours of pouring over papers.
BTW-to anyone who's considering doing thier own dossier, you can totally do it! I won't lie, it's alot of paperchasing. But, at the end, I'm really glad I didn't pay someone to do what I could totally do. If you can follow directions and be organized at all, you can handle it and save yourself quite a bit of $.
Good night!
9 comments:
Now you can rest.....Congrats
A beautiful day - so happy and excited for you - waiting list, here you come! Cute, cute pic of Hayden and "the box" and your dosier was really really cute - I love how you made it pretty for yourself - little Lucy is going to love that you made it pretty - I have a feeling that she is going to be "your heart" in more ways than you know and I think that the little heart on Ethiopia will have greater meaning as the years unfold.
Hi! My husband and I are also adopting from Ethiopia, and we just sent our dossier off yesterday! I totally relate to your post. Feel free to check us out at sydjackraehawks.blogspot.com I hope your process continues to go well!
Julie
Yeah, kiss that thing goodbye!
Soon you will have something much better to kiss!!
Aw - you made yours super cute! :)
I remember the relief I had when sending that thing off and getting it off our hands. It's a lot of work in that binder! Congrats!
Woohoo! Rejoicing with you on another big step! SO exciting and definitely worth celebrating. :-) We just got our appt. for our USCIS fingerprints..hopefully the turnaround is quick(?) We're almost there. We also found out that our referral for our son can come anytime, his paperwork is being submitted tomorrow. Yahoo!
So, I'm really interested in having you make a t-shirt (or 2)...can you email me at whowangus(at)yahoo(dot)com to let me know what's involved in a special order?
Thanks! :-)
I'm not bragging or anything but I got to touch that Dossier. Both hands. I even looked at some documents.
I thought the margarita was because of the poop smeared all over your house! :0)
congrats!!! ours is ALMOST finished. had to have the homestudy re-written b/c it stated that my husband is an american citizen and he's not... and apparently that one little correction takes over 2 weeks to fix??? trying not to make a big deal of it... :-)
i felt the same way just after sending off the big group of initial paperwork for gladney! i did feel attached to it! so funny.
so happy for you and you family!!!!
Congrats for sending Dossier off, and being waitlisted!! We had a similar experience with our good-byes when we mailed ours yesterday... so hard to trust another person with all our priceless papers. Your dossier binder is precious... wish I had thought of doing that! :)
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