and I am exhausted! I can't even begin to tell you how busy this dossier is keeping me. I will give you a little recap of all the running around and calling around I have done. On 5/17, I went down to the Tampa Police Department to get a local police letter done. Our agency said our place of birth needed to be included in this letter. Well, of course the police department refused to do that. So, this past week I called the
Hillsborough County
Sheriff's Department and pleaded with the lady there till finally she agreed to add it in their letter. We went on Friday to get that done. On 5/22, we went to have medical exams done (again). Only this time there was much more our doctor had to fill out and write. Thankfully, my wonderful Aunt Candy drove all the way over to our doctors to notarize these forms. And did I mention that both the medical form and local police letter will expire after 3 months. So, we will be getting those done again soon. After calling many different psychologists and psychiatrists, we were finally able to find someone to see us and evaluate us (we have an appointment on Monday 6/4). There is nothing certain that they have to do, but make sure we are sane enough to raise an adopted child and write a letter saying so. As soon as most of them heard the word adoption, they said they couldn't help us. I had to find a CPA to verify our assets and that was also quite a task trying to find one to see us.
Luckily my mom called the CPA they use to do the books and her work and she was more than willing to help. She will be doing this for us on Thursday. Thursday night we drove down to Davie because we had an 8a appointment to get fingerprinted. It was a long 4 hours there Thursday night, 10
mins at the
USCIS office on Friday and a long 4 hours back. Now all the
USCIS needs is a copy of our written
home study (which should hopefully be done in a week). I have heard it takes them anywhere from 2-6 weeks to approve (at least we hope they will approve us). Are you lost yet at all we have had to do? Well that's not all. We also had to get 6 certified copies of our marriage certificate and certified copies of our house deed. Thankfully my friend Sam works at the clerk of courts (?) office and was able to get all that for us. We still have to get a property verification letter from the appraiser's office and are not having any luck with that so far. I have been told by others that they had the hardest time getting this letter. I have learned through this that there are quite a lot of rude people out there at these businesses I have called. It seems as soon as they hear adoption, they can't help you. It's quite frustrating! We have to compile a set of pictures of: every side of our house (done), every room in our house (done), 3 different angles of babies room and a minimum of 12 pictures of us and family. I'm still working on that. There is also tons of paperwork we have to fill out and get notarized. We are also waiting on our passports to get here since copies of those are needed for our dossier. We paid extra to have them
expedited, so hopefully they will be here in the next few weeks. Then we have to send EVERYTHING to the Secretary of State (in Florida) to
appostile each document (at $10 each). It's amazing everything you have to go through and get to adopt. Most people have no idea. I know in the end it will all be worth it, but for now it's exhausting and sometimes frustrating. At least it keeps me busy.
We have been looking at dressers and bed sets for the nursery lately. It's funny that we have waited for 3 years to be able to pick out and buy these things, but yet we can't seem to decide on any. We change our minds on an daily basis. It's such a hard decision.
