Homestudy: check!

On Friday we had our final homestudy visit. Yay!!!
Bev, our social worker, said that she should have it written in 7-10 days.

What's next you ask?
We wait for the homestudy to arrive in our hot little hands. We will actually receive several notarized copies. We must take one of those copies along with $685 dollars and send it along to the US Citizen and immigration Service (USCIS). We have to receive permission from them to bring a foreign orphan home and make them a citizen. Both Pat and I need to be fingerprinted in Boston and have FBI checks performed on us.

Adoption is expensive. But when you understand all the fees and who and where they go to, it doesn't seem so bad. The only fees that I find seriously questionable are the ones placed by our own US government. Let's take the aforementioned $685. They charge us $70 each to do fingerprints?! Heck! I have my own ink in every color! LOL! Then they charge us $545 to give us permission to bring the child into the US!? Then we will be charged $380 by the US consulate in VN for the babie's Visa. And while we are on the subject, let me mention that I felt totally ripped off when Pat, the kids and I needed to all renew our passports a couple of months ago. They charge nearly $100 for each of the kids. AND, $15 each for the passport photos.

Ok...my little vent is over. Aren't we lucky that I can type such things and not be persecuted by the government.

So, what else needs to be done? I need to take all of our documents that had to be notarized (which was evertything) and now have them certified by the state. This means that the state has certify with a seal that all those notarizations are valid and legal, if they are all legal, they put their special seal on each document. (all for a fee of course! LOL!) Then, I have to send all the documents to the Vietnamese Consulate in San Francisco to be authenticated. This means that they have to place THEIR special seal on all of our stuff too, for a fee. ;) I *think*, that again, their seal means all documents are true and legal.

All of this to take us up to mid-late January. I expect around that time we will receive our referral!