The process...part III

I'm trying to keep the size of the posts somewhat manageable, so I apologize if it's driving anyone nuts that I keep cutting off in the middle of the story...

The weekend before our individual interviews, we had a paperwork meeting in Louisville (about a 4h drive for us). We love our facilitators, and I think they are doing a fantastic job, but we really have a hard time driving 4h each way for a 40 minute meeting! We took lunch with us, so we sat in the sun and had a picnic afterwards which was a lot of fun, and good relaxation for us. :) At the meeting, we received a packet of all of the documents that will be included in our dossier to be sent to Ukraine. They gave us sample copies, so we will retype them with our names and information. Everything has to be notarized and then apostilled, which is a certification from the state saying the the notary is certified (sort of a double check). This process stems from the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption which is an international agreement that set up rules and regulations that all participating countries agreed to abide by. So when we do an international adoption, if we are going through a country that participates in the Hague Convention, they have agreed to accept our documents as official if we have a notary and apostille on them.
Our facilitators also informed us that all of our documents in our dossier need to be within 30 days old when we put our dossier together. This means we will need to get our state background checks again (Mark's driving to Jeff City this time *lol*) and our marriage license again, because the notary dates on those will be over 30 days old when we start putting our dossier together. This sounds like a lot of work, but it's actually very important. There are many couples who are getting ready to travel or who are in Ukraine who have had documents expire, and had to find ways to redo them and resubmit them. The Ukrainian govt considers all documents over a year old to be expired, even if they would not be expired in the US, so it is in our best interest that all of our documents be as current as possible. For enforcing this I am very grateful to our facilitators, because it will make our life much easier later on!