Application Officially Filed!

We received an email from late Friday night from our lawyer in Colombia that the translations of all 24 documents in our dossier had been completed as of Friday morning. Our lawyer also stated that she had already picked up the completed dossier and presented it with our official application to ICBF (the government agency who oversees adoptions in Colombia)!

Amazingly we now already have a case number and our lawyer has the name and information about the individual at ICBF who is going to be reviewing our dossier and application and has worked with this person before. We were not counting on the translations to be completed in time for our application to be submitted this week so we are so excited at how quickly it is going for us right now. Of course knowing that it could be just a matter of a few months from here until we are united with our child is amazing and maybe just a little bit scary too.

Our Baby's Future Nursery

We wanted to share with everyone a little taste of the room we have created for our child after we return from Colombia. Thanks to Monica's parents for helping with all of the painting, her brother and his wife for the beautiful crib, and especially all of our baby's future cousins for our baby's first stuff animal; the frog that is waiting for it's owner to come home.

Breaking News: Adoption Dossier en route to Colombia!

After a few late nights this past week putting all of the final touches on our adoption dossier, we received the final document that we were waiting for on Thursday. We sent two copies of our dossier to our lawyer in Bogota, one copy contains mostly copies of the documents is for her records and the other is the official dossier that will be submitted to ICBF.

The translator in Bogota is expecting our dossier this coming week and typically takes a week or so to translate the entire thing. Then our lawyer will present us to ICBF and then we are really rolling!

We can’t believe that we have actually finished all of the adoption requirements here in the US, especially since we have not had the agency doing all the paperwork for us and we have done almost everything ourselves.

What’s next you might ask? Well, now it’s time for us to:

1) Wait for any news or emergency needs for changes to our dossier

2) Begin working on our baby registry

3) Get prepared to become parents (as if that’s really possible)

We are hopeful that from this point it will only be a matter of months before we are united with our baby in Colombia, but we are also conscious that there are a lot of things outside of our control that may affect the timing. So we are trying to be optimistic about the timing but not lock our hearts around a particular month or anything.