Since November is National Adoption Month, I wanted to make sure we updated you all where we are at in our process! We completed our application process with the USCIS and we received our approval letter a few weeks ago. From there, I was able to take ALL of our documents to the Secretary of State office downtown to get everything apostilled. For those of you not familiar with an apostille, it is basically an authentication of your notary. Pretty intense :) So every for that we had to have notarized, needed to be apostilled as well. It took me three trips to get everything taken care of, but after that, we were able to send our dossier packet off to our agency along with our second agency payment. Thank you so much to those of you who have supported us financially and helped us make that happen! We have been working primarily with Generations Adoption here in Austin to complete our homestudy and dossier package, and now that we have completed that step, we will transition into working mostly with Jackie, from the International Child Foundation (ICF) in Arizona. They are the ones who have been doing adoptions in Burundi and they have a lawyer, Pierre, on the ground in Burundi who helps with the whole process. Pierre is now translating our dossier into French and then he will submit it to the Central Authority of the Burundian Government. That should happen by the end of the month! Then we will be eligible to be matched with a child! That process could take any number of months, but we are definitely one step closer. Thank you all again for your support and prayers!
Much love,
Brian and Kristen
