Our international adoption adventures have allowed us to become very familiar with FedEx. Too familiar. We need frequent flyer miles or stock in the company, because we’ve been spending more time at the FedEx store lately than anywhere else!
Allow us to explain (well this is our blog after all…) we’re in the very last step of the dossier process which requires our FBI background clearances and 3×3 photos of us to attach to our dossier. We’ll start with the FBI.
Siana’s fingerprints didn’t come out right the first time, so she had to re-do them and send them in again. Pause, wait for 5 weeks, then got them back at which time we had to send both of our fingerprint clearances to Washington, DC for apostille. Because this was the last piece of the dossier dragging behind the rest, we decided to FedEx the results and then include a FedEx return to get it back quickly.
We then received them back (apostilled hooray!) and then had to FedEx them again to our agency.
We realize that is a lot of publicity for FedEx, but this is how we’re doing it and this blog is all about the truth!
Next we had to send 3×3 photos. Sounds easy. It isn’t. Nobody prints 3×3 photos. Nobody. It’s not a standard size, it’s some sort of oddball shape that no photo place or even online vendor will print. So we did it the old fashioned way, we cut them to size.
Our good friend Tricia, who is a whiz at graphic stuff, sized the photos down to 3×3 and then saved them as PDF’s. Thanks dude. We then printed them out individually and cut them down to size.
And voilà! 3×3 photos fit for a dossier!
Did we mention we also did this at the FedEx store? We seriously need to get a kickback from them, no really – FedEx, are you listening, hello!
What does all this mean in the scheme of international adoption? This means we have completed our dossier and now our agency is submitting that dossier to Mexico. The dossier will now travel first to Mexico City, to the SRE and the National DIF, and then is sent on to the state DIF. To translate the acronyms into English and then Spanish (cuz that’s how we roll) SRE is the Secretary for Exterior Relations, or the Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores and DIF is National System for the Full Development of the Family, or the Sistema Nacional de Desarollo Integral de la Familia. We know that seems like a lot of words for DIF, but sometimes things get lost in translation.
In any case, now we wait. The next step is the referral, where we are matched with children and go to visit them. But for now we’re happy to have won the war of the dossier, which consisted of the battle of the FBI Clearance, the battle of blood tests and the battle of the FedEx paper cutter.
YAY! The dossier is finished! Now you can breathe for a minute and eat turkey…. until the next trip to FedEx 🙂
Next the REAL fun begins (cue circus music)
xoxo
Hope this is the last of your encounters with the apostille. I had about five more documents to apostille after my dossier was submitted to Russia…..or was it after the first trip….The memory fades away, much like the pain of childbirth (or so they say)
Anyway, never assume anything….You now have a new marketable skill for dealing in bureaucracy….and a possible new job at FedEx
Kisses.
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