Today's Fundraising Picture and Dossier Information

Your mission - should you choose to accept it - is to help us reach our mini goal of $2000.
Your reward - a picture of Jelly will be posted for everyone to see.

Yesterday was AMAZING! We had two individual contributors donating $250 each! Those people were Nichole T. and Jonathan A. WOW! Thank you! Other contributors yesterday were Mike and Connie S, Rachel G, Samantha F, Lisa B, Nancy S, and a yet unknown person whom donated to Reece's Rainbow. I will ask for the Reece's Rainbow contributors' names weekly. We had an amazing first day - raising $773.50! That is 39% of our mini-goal! Since we earned 39% of our mini-goal, I am posting 39% of Jelly's picture! You can see his adorable hair (which looks very blonde in this picture and clearly strawberry in others...) and about a quarter of his face. He's SO adorable. I cannot wait to share the whole thing with you!

As promised, I want to outline the process a little bit for you (as best I understand right now.) A dossier is a bundle of documents sent to the government that our Little Man is in right now. This dossier contains information about our finances, our family, our home, our jobs, our health, and it contains our home study. In order to submit your dossier, you must first collect all of the documents. Then you must have them notarized. After notarization takes place, you send your entire dossier to the state and they apostille it. An apostille is more or less like a notary for the notaries. They make sure that they notary publics who notarized our documents are indeed notaries, that they are in good standing, and that everything has been filled out correctly. Once the apostilling takes place, the state will mail the dossier back to us and we will send it off to Jelly's agency in Eastern Europe. There, it will be translated and turned over to the government who will review it and send us a "referral" to come meet Little Man Hinz. The date to travel is given to us by the government. Once we go over, we get to meet Jelly, do paperwork, and start the official adoption process in country. (Unlike, Ukraine, we will not be staying for an extended period of time. This country requires two 7-10 day trips.) Once we get the ball rolling, we come home and prepare for the arrival of Jelly. The pick-up trip is typically 2-4 months after the first trip. We are really hoping to have our dossier done by August 1st. This means we have a lot of money to make and raise before then! Almost $7000. This adoption is so different from Sterling's adoption - we are learning as we go!

There are 13 documents needs in our dossier and we currently have 6 of them complete. Once our home study gets completed (we had to update it and run new background checks, child abuse checks, and fingerprint checks) we will have 8. Our Social Worker thinks this should be done by May 1st.

I hope that helps you to better understand the timeline. Thanks for joining us!