DC trip

I've been MIA on this blog for a while, but there's been a reason--we've been busy!  Last week we had a wonderful visit with my whole family, which I'd like to write about soon.  But before that we had some travel, so I'll back up and talk about that in this entry!

Once we finish our current step in the adoption process, we will be ready to send our dossier (packet of documents) to China for their final approval of the adoption.  But China needs a way to ensure that adoption documents are legitimate.  So, each document must first be notarized at the time it is produced.  Then, the department of state of the state in which the document was signed must review the notary's signature and attach the seal of state attesting that the signature is genuine.  Then (not in all cases, but in our case), the U.S. Department of State must review the state seal and attach the Department of State seal attesting that the state seal is genuine.  And then the Chinese embassy reviews the Department of State seal and attaches their own seal attesting that that is genuine.  And only then can the documents, duly proven to be legitimate, be sent on to China.

So a couple of weeks ago we drove up to our state capitol and got the state seal on all of the documents (like police reports and letters of employment) that had been produced locally.  We didn't have time to mail all of the documents to the State Department in DC, get them back, and then mail them back to DC to the Chinese embassy.  We could have used a courier to get our stack of documents efficiently through both sets of authentications, and in fact it would have cost a little less than traveling there ourselves.  But Esther has been showing signs of really missing her friends again, so I thought that since we were going to be spending money on these documents anyway, why not use it to buy train tickets for Esther and myself to go up to DC, see friends, and walk the documents through their authentication process in person.  So we made plans, and on Wednesday, off we went.

The train ride was fun.  Mostly.  It's about seven hours, which is a long time to be asking an active child to do quiet activities in their seat.  (We did take some walks up and down the cars nearest to us, and of course to the bathroom.)  Esther did very well, though, and I got a feel for what activities are absorbing to her now--information that will be very useful on our long plane trip to China this summer!  (Yes, she is coming with us.)  The scenery was beautiful, particularly on the trip up, when very wet weather caused little waterfalls running down the side of the forested hills.  And we had a cool view of the Jefferson memorial and Washington monument coming into DC.  I did learn that I need to work with Esther on concepts of personal property.  The woman we sat next to at first (who was quite friendly and kind to Esther) had an I-phone, and Esther kept reaching over and trying to grab it out of our seatmate's lap and play with it!!  Then on the way back she spontaneously shared her address and phone number (or as much as she knows of them) with someone we had just met--I guess I'm going to be working with her on privacy too.  Sigh.  She did nap in both directions, though later than usual and under protest.

We had a great time with the friends we stayed with.  Their younger daughter was unfortunately feeling under the weather, but their older daughter (about nine months older than Esther) and Esther had a great time playing together.  We wished we could have seen other friends as well, but really didn't have time, as I spent almost the whole day on Thursday dealing with documents downtown.

Our paperwork process was a "That's Good, That's Bad" sort of experience.

We got the documents to the Department of State Authentications office in time to get them done during their morning hours.  That's good!  But when we headed out towards the Chinese embassy I stood on the wrong side of the street to catch our bus, missed it, and ended up spending 45 minutes standing in the rain next to a busy street, with a backpack of important documents, a bored preschooler, and only one umbrella.  That's bad!  Oh yeah, and because of the delay we missed the morning office hours at the embassy.  That's also bad!  But when we finally got on the right bus, it turned out that the bus route went right by the Safeway where we had met a friend for lunch last time we were in DC, so we hopped off the bus and shared a strawberry-banana smoothie for lunch in a nice, dry spot.  And I had time before the embassy re-opened to stop at a Fed-Ex location and check that I had filled out my airbill for return mail of the documents correctly.  That's good!  When we got to the embassy, we didn't have to wait too long before we got called.  That's also good!  But the embassy requires people submitting documents for authentication to make photocopies of all their documents, and while I had copied the documents themselves, I hadn't copied all of the prior authentication pages.  That's bad!  But the embassy had a photocopier.  That's good!  But the copies were 25 cents each, and I had twelve documents.  That's bad!  But the photocopier was broken that day, so copies were free.  That's good!  So I copied all of the extra pages, carefully put everything in order and double-checked it (meanwhile Esther had fallen asleep in the carrier on my back and my back was killing me), and went back to the window.  This time all the paperwork was in order, but when I went to hand the woman my carefully-prepared FedEx envelope she said, "We don't do mail-back service for walk-ins, only if you mail it in."  That's very, very bad! So I told the woman at the desk that I needed a minute to think about what to do, and quickly reviewed my options.  The documents were supposed to be ready for pick-up in four days, at which point I would no longer be in DC, so I couldn't pick them up myself.  I hated to carry them back home and mail them in after having gone to all the trouble of making a personal trip.  I definitely couldn't afford to pay the fee to get one-day service so I could pick them up the next morning before leaving, and I wasn't real thrilled about paying for a courier service after making the trip in person, either.  Then I remembered that my friend whom I had met in that area for lunch in January actually lives and works within walking distance of the embassy.  So I made an urgent call to her cellphone to see if she would be willing to pick them up for me and mail them to me, and she said yes.  That's GOOD!  So I turned in the documents, double-checked that it would be okay for someone else to pick them up, and heaved a sigh of relief.  We had a further minor mix-up as Grace rushed to meet me at the embassy while I rushed to meet her at her work, but we finally connected (at the Safeway again!) and had a nice little visit while handing off paperwork.

The rest of the trip went smoothly.  The properly authenticated documents are now at WACAP's (our agency's) office, getting ready to be sent to China as soon as our immigration pre-approval is generated.  Meanwhile, our immigration process seems to be going a little more quickly than the norm, not due to any human intervention that I'm aware of, but I know there are people praying!  Our fingerprint appointments are for this Thursday, but we're going to drive up tomorrow morning and see if they'll take us early.  We are praying that a spot on Tim's finger won't cause any problems.

On a side note, I made a discovery in this authentication process that saved us a good bit of money as well as some time.  We had documents produced in four different states, each of which happened to fall under the jurisdiction of a different Chinese consulate or embassy.  If we had sent the three documents that didn't go to the Chinese embassy to their three respective consulates, it would have meant paying additional mailing costs for two of the consulates, and a rather exorbitant (for just one document) fee to use a courier service for a third consulate that doesn't accept mailed-in applications.  But it turns out that the Chinese embassy in DC can accept documents from ANY state as long as they go through the U.S. Department of State first!  (That meant paying for one extra level of authentication, but it was less than the cost of mailing the documents would have been, let alone using a courier service.)  Since most of our documents HAD to go through the embassy, it was much more convenient and less expensive to do them all together.  Yay for that discovery, and for one more step checked off our list!!