Praise God, It Worked!

After a very long day, the last few documents for our dossier are on their way to our agency via FedEx! We all went to the base legal office at 8:30 am to sign the last couple of forms that had been rewritten to meet the new standards in St. Petersburg. Garin and I then went to the Secretary of State office in town, dropped off the documents to be apostilled and headed home. Within minutes of walking in the door, we heard our home study caseworker knocking at the door with the forms her agency had to redo, so Garin and I then headed off to Harrisburg, PA, to have those apostilled. (Unfortunately, all documents must be apostilled in the state in which the notary is licensed. In our case, because our agency's home office is in PA, their documents have to go there.)

Karl picked up the documents in Dover on his lunch hour and sent them off.

After three hours in the car, Garin and I arrived in Harrisburg to find it a much larger and busier town than I had anticipated! I drove around several blocks before finding parking near the State complex that wasn't dedicated to State employees. We ended up finding street parking that was three blocks away. When I went to load the meter with quarters, I discovered I had only one! I dropped it in the slot, hoping for 30 minutes....no such luck. The meter read "10". I searched the car, under the seats, my purse...everywhere. I then started praying for quarters from heaven. Truly, I asked God for quarters! None materialized, so off we went, praying instead that we would not come back to find a parking ticket.

We power-walked the three blocks and quickly discovered that the town was not meant for strollers. I carried the stroller with Garin in it up the big fancy steps into the building because we could find no ramp. I won't even go into the sidewalk issues. I can't believe that they haven't been sued for lack of compliance to ADA. Or maybe they have.

Thankfully, the apostille folks are very efficient. I no sooner wrote the check and sat down than they brought the finalized documents out to me. It seriously took less than two minutes.

Then off we sprinted to get to the car before the meter reader. And I kid you not....When we came flying around the corner, he was standing at the car in front of ours, putting a parking ticket under the windshield. Just as we passed him and got to our car, he walked back toward us. Whew! And we were 11 minutes over! I was so thankful for the nick of time!

I had written the names and addresses of two FedEx locations before I left home. I knew there was no hope of finding them and decided to wait and look in the next town. As we headed back to the interstate, there was a big sign for the exit to "Paxton St." which just happened to be the street the FedEx Kinko's was on! We hopped off and found it two blocks later!!! It felt so good to get everything in the mail and out of our hands!

Garin and I celebrated at the Starbucks next door: a diaper change and strawberries and cream frapuccino for him, a potty break and iced decaf sugar-free hazelnut non-fat latte for me. Then off we headed toward home. It took us almost four hours to get home, thanks to Friday rush hour traffic, but we did it!!!

Our documents will be in Michigan on Monday and hopefully in the mail to Russia on Tuesday. And then there will hopefully be enough time to translate them and register them the following Tuesday. That is our prayer, anyway.

I frequent several blogs of Russia adoptive parents, several of whom are in the midst of the dossier and travel process. One of these families had their documents registered on Feb. 26 and got an invitation to travel yesterday!!! They leave next Friday, March 21!!! We can only hope for such a quick turnaround. I'm starting to get a little bit scared.....in the best possible way!