Le Grand Jour d'Apostilles

In an ode to the French, whom we have to thank for the word "apostille", I have entitled this post in French. For those who took Spanish, the title means The Great Day of Apostilles.

Here's part of the Wikipedia definition of apostille: Apostille is also a French word which means a certification. It is commonly used in English to refer to the legalization of a document for international use under the terms of the 1961 Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirement of Legalization for Foreign Public Documents. Documents which have been notarized by a notary public, and certain other documents, and then certified with a conformant apostille are accepted for legal use in all the nations that have signed the Hague Convention.

I am happy to say that the offices of the Secretary of State in both Kansas and Missouri provide apostilles fairly painlessly - for a fee, of course! We know from experience as today's part of the adoption journey took us to Topeka for apostilling of the bulk of our Russia registration documents and then to downtown Kansas City for the apostilling of our Missouri marriage certificates (we were very glad to discover that while the capitol of Missouri is Jefferson City, a satellite office of the Secretary of State provides the aspostilling service, saving us the wait of mailing our certs to Jeff City or the time of driving to and from Jeff City - though my aunt and uncle would have loved to have had us visit!).

Now all of our Russia registration documents are ready to be FedExed to our agency tomorrow...to arrive Friday, which means...drum roll, please...that we will have submitted our initial paperwork before Christmas, which has been our goal since June! We can celebrate Christmas and ring in the New Year knowing that we've done all we can to this point (assuming, of course, that all of our docs are OK, which they should be, because they've been checked by our agency twice). We can tuck ourselves in and wait for the gift of a region assignment - when we'll know to which part of Russia we've been "assigned". As soon as we know, you'll know.

Our other news: the mice are now upstairs, in our master bedroom closet. *#&@*!&!&!(@_#_