For those of you playing along at home, the last few days have felt like a game of Chutes and Ladders.  I spent a good chunk of this week trying to get in touch with a special courier in New York that services adoptive families. As mentioned in previous posts about our dossier prep, our Pennsylvania documents have to be authenticated in New York City at the Chinese Consulate– who also happens to not take mail-in forms. This means that we needed to find a person who’d be willing to stand in line forever at the NY Consulate and hand-deliver our forms to be reviewed– then pick them up a week later and ship them back to us.

After several days of waiting to get in touch with them, they responded, and we in turn made visit #3 to our favorite UPS store. (A rather humorous side note– we keep dealing with the same employee at this store. I can’t tell if he recognizes us or not, but I almost had a heart attack when he proceeded to shove our documents into an envelope; I finally spoke up and said “Please don’t crease those papers!!!” I’m sure he thinks I’m a loon, but after all we’ve been through thus far, I don’t think he’s that far off.)

So that’s all good news! Where’ the chute in all of this? Well, our village has been diligently preparing our local police clearance letters, and sadly, we had to have them rewritten a second time because they didn’t have an appropriate notary statement. When we went to pick them up mid-week, I noticed that mine looked fine, but Brian’s had a notary stamp that didn’t transfer all of the ink of the stamp. I had a bad feeling about it, so I scanned it to our agency, and sure enough, it was rejected. We went back to the office this afternoon to find that the office closes early on Friday (good for them!) I do not look forward to asking the nice ladies in the office to rewrite Brian’s letter a third time.

To add further complications, our bloodwork and labs came back, and our physicians have been working on our physician evaluation forms. Brian had a follow-up appointment this week to pick up his form, and he noticed when he got home that the doctor wrote in a little note about his tonsillectomy when he was three. Serves me right for marrying an Eagle Scout– only he’d report this in surgical history!! Because she listed it and made a note, hoping to help us, it actually invalidated the whole report. So now we have the choice of either having his doctor write a follow-up letter indicating that his tonsillectomy in no way hinders his ability to be a parent, or we get the whole form rewritten without her additional comments. Oh, and we have to make sure the medical office notary restamps it again. Ugh.

A year from now, I know we’re going to look back on all of this and hopefully be laughing about how these problems were so silly and inconsequential. For now though, I am starting to truly understand the meaning of the word “paperchase.”