Dossier Complete!

Well, finally the dossier is off to Holt in Eugene, OR. Had planned on NOT spending all day yesterday chasing paper but as it turned out that is exactly what happened. One of our nieces is in town and we planned on doing fun things like going to the Arch, etc but instead we spent all day doing dossier things. Here is the story. Had planned on just running all the docs down to the Secretary of States office yesterday morning to have them certified, copy and ship. What I found out was the about seven of the items we had did not have the affirmation jurat on them (but had the notary stamp and signature) which is the statement that says basically, "Yup I swear this is a valid document". SO, we had to turn around, drive back out to the doctor, my bank, our bank and then to another bank where all the docs had originally been notarized to have the affirmation jurat on the docs by the same notary. After that, it was back in the car to downtown again. This whole thing started around 9:00 am and by this time it was 3:30 pm when we got back to the Secretary of State. Keep in mind our niece who is 14 is with us, doing all this. What a trooper! So after about 1 1/2 hours waiting all the docs are state certified. By this time there was no way to get to Kinko's copy all the docs three times, sort and pack them as needed and make it to the airport to catch FedEx because all of us were headed BACK downtown for the Blues game! So, all in all we put 351 miles on the car yesterday made three trips to downtown.
So early this morning I went to Kinko's, made triplicate copies of the dossier, packed the original and two copies and FedEx'd them to Holt. We keep another copy. Yes! Time to cross that off the list and celebrate another small step! It usually take 2-3 days for Holt to verify everything that is in the dossier making sure everything is in order etc. Once that it complete, it is sent to the Vietnamese Consulate in San Francisco for authentication and translation. Stay tuned!