Family Nopal

Siana’s attempt to make things fun…

This week we will be borrowing from the old African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” and will be amending it to fit the world of adoption:

It takes a village of organization, friends, adoption professionals, notaries, state apostille officials and the FBI to complete an international adoption dossier.

Not as warm and touchy feely, but the reality is setting in.  We got the list of what we need to compile for our dossier that will be submitted to Mexico and it is beyond daunting.  Everything needs to be notarized.  And apostilled.  Strange things have to be notarized like copies of our passports and utility bills.  Not the actual passports, just photocopies, huh? We need to get our doctor’s to sign off (again, see blog about home study) on our health and then get that notarized.  We will later discuss how we sneak a notary into the doctor’s office.

And what the heck is apostille? An Apostille (pronounced “ah-po-steel”) is a French word meaning certification.  Ok, cool, just looked this up online. An Apostille is simply the name for a specialized certificate, issued by the California Secretary of State.  The Apostille, which contains a stamped red seal, is attached to your original document to verify it is legitimate and authentic.  So basically, after we get everything notarized, we then take it for apostille and it’s another double check that the notary is legit in the state.  Double double check.  But that all comes at the end after we’ve assembled all paperwork, so there will be more talk of apostille in the future, don’t you worry! Moving on…

First step in the dossier process is for us to process an FBI background check.  And here’s a shout out to the FBI: I couldn’t figure out what form to use from their website and called the FBI customer service number and talked to a really nice guy that walked me through it all and helped me figure it out.   The best part is that we get fingerprinted, again!  And apparently we will get finger printed again again when the USCIS form comes back.  Awesome.  Awesome awesome.  We’re going to start saying everything twice since we do everything two and three times.

Now for the fun part, the village of organization.  I decided to make the filing system for all this adoption paperwork fun by using brightly colored folders.

And also bought a long sought after label maker which makes labeling fun.

Yes, the word “fun” was used three times in the last three sentences, just keeping with our theme of repeating ourselves to mimic the paperwork.

Finally, here’s an updated photo of our second nopal that has sprouted so many pencas we can’t keep up!

At first we thought it wasn’t going to sprout anything and now it is more prolific than the first one.  We are hoping that other things in the adoption dossier process continue to pleasantly surprise us like this nopal.

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