The Process in a Nutshell

As I said earlier, we sent our first application in June of 2008. We were shocked at how fast things would get started. Within days we had our first agency "To Do List." We began to scramble to get passports, prepare the house for the home study, and prepare ourselves for the home study. The home study has been the most terrifying part so far, but as it turned out it was not bad at all. The home study was finished in October, and we started to get all the document ready to go to Russia. What a process that was. Each document had to be notarized and apostilled separately. (apostilled: the state dept. has to verify that each notary is legitimate) After this is done, then the agency had to review all the documents before sending them to Russia. And wouldn't you know, we had to redo some of these forms. So to make this long story a little shorter our documents were sent to Russia just before Christmas. Oh yeah, did I tell you that the Russia government takes a holiday from Dec 15 to Jan 12. Well they do. I believe our facilitator worked to get the documents translated during this time though. We found out this week that we have officially been registered in Russia since January 14th.