Hurdles overcome in our race to December 9

Well, since my last post, there's been no end of the drama here. We did finish updating our documents and we sent them off to our adoption agency as planned; they arrived on Monday, were reviewed and translations were completed but we still needed the updated documents we had carried to KZ in October and given to the judge. Of particular importance were the FBI clearances and the medicals that usually take weeks to complete. Suffice it to say that we really didn't want to have to redo those...so over Thanksgiving weekend, a flurry of emails between Kazakhstan and the US resulted in finding out where our docs were, connecting with the family who hand-carried our docs back from KZ, and getting them to FedEx said precious docs to our adoption agency to complete our dossier. (Many thanks, Thomas family!) The docs arrived at our agency on Tuesday morning...so that should have been good, right?
Yeah, well, Tuesday night, the agency director called me in a panic...the packet from KZ was missing our FBI clearances. Without those, we wouldn't have a complete dossier....who knows what happened to them and how they got pulled out of the packet that I hand-carried to KZ, but they were gone. Without FBI clearances, our dossier would not be legalized before December 9, our judge's deadline in order for us to be given a court date.

Luckily, I had a 2nd set of FBI clearances in my adoption file. (Believe it, yes, I am just that paranoid...but see, being somewhat obsessive about paperwork/multiple sets of original docs can be a good thing.) I made the trip into Boston to have our precious FBI cards apostilled on Wednesday. I was a bit nervous since I had problems when I tried to get these same docs apostilled a couple of weeks ago. However, I'm now on a first name basis with Cathy of the Certifications and Apostilles office who has been awesome about helping me on my last 2 visits. (It might have helped that I brought all 3 kids with me on the day before Thanksgiving when I was dropping off some documents...Tanya asked her if she was going to help us get her brothers home...everyone thanked her for helping our family...and we made a human connection that broke through the red tape barrier.) Anyway, Cathy apostilled my FBI cards in five minutes flat yesterday and I scurried over to FedEx to overnight them to our agency. They were delivered today (Yes, of course, I tracked the delivery, silly...our package was delivered at 10:37am!) which means we should have everything for a brand-spanking new dossier.

So what happens now? Well, the dossier was assembled, the translations were attached, and copies were made today. The file was FedExed to Washington DC this afternoon...I got an email from our adoption agency at a little after 5pm saying that they had completed everything and the dossier was on its way. It will be delivered to a courier by 10:30am tomorrow, has to be filed at the Embassy by noon. The courier is standing by...if there are no glitches (frantically knocking on my wood desk as I type this), our dossier will be registered and will be officially under review on December 5.

The next hurdle is getting the dossier approved/legalized before Dec 9. If the guy at the embassy treats this as an emergency, he will review and legalize it in time...if not, we're dead in the water again. The judge won't give us a court date until we have a legalized dossier. If we can't get it legalized by Dec 9, I'm not sure what that means...but I'm sure I'll be awake in the middle of the night worrying about it until we get an answer.

Keep your fingers crossed for us...and to all of you who have emailed and left us comments, thanks for your support. It means the world to us, especially right now.