The Dossier

13 documents that tell the story of our life on paper.

Birth certificates, marriage certificates, financial statements, employer verifications, physician's statements, home study, immigration approval.....

All these documents are supposed to tell authorities in China who we are and why we want to adopt a little girl from their country.

HA! This is something that cannot be described 100 documents, let alone 13.

13 documents that took us almost 5 months to gather, culminating with the I-797 - approval from the US government to allow us to bring a child into this country.

All must be notarized. All must be certified by the Secretary of State. All must receive that, oh so important, Chinese Consulate sticker of authentication.

I just can't adequately describe the amount of paperwork it took to gather all of this. In order to reduce our carbon footprint, we will have to plant a few trees in Grace's name when she is home.

You all can read here, how scared I was when we started this paperchase. I REALLY thought I might not be up for the task.

BUT...

Here it is.... our dossier.

Our 13 magnificent, lovely, don't you just want to gaze at their beauty, documents.

As if gathering these documents wasn't hard enough. We also had to send three pictures of S and I alone. OK. We managed that alright. But we also had to find EIGHT pictures of S and I together in a picture with other people. We BOTH had to be the pictures.

I TAKE the pictures. I'm not IN the pictures! This was a bit more tricky.

So, there it is. Our family story (until now) wrapped up in 13 documents and 8 pictures.

What's the dossier missing?

It doesn't seem to convey the love that we feel for our daughter who is strangely missing from these pictures. How I wish there was a way.