Sharing some e-mail...

The following e-mails are from Bonnie, our Vietnam facilitator. I e-mailed her just a little while ago to check in and get a status update, and find out what to do next. First she sent this:

Hi Shannon,

Now is the hard part!! At this time you are in the waiting for your
referrals part of the process. The current time estimate for referrals is
3 to 4 months from dossier submission. However, its possible it will take
longer since you are asking for two! When the referrals are issued you
will receive a phone call from me with the good news. Assuming you accept
your referrals we expect you to travel within 3 months of accepting them.

You did a great job of getting your dossier together.

Bonnie

I e-mailed her back to find out just where our dossier was, and to make sure she knew how to find us, since we'll be all over the East Coast/Midwest in July & August. She sent this:

Hi Shannon,


Your dossier is halfway to VN already and its delivery date is expected to
be tomorrow. Yes, I have your contact information. Don't worry, I'll find
you when the good news comes. Those are my favorite phone calls!

Bonnie


How cool is that? They didn't use our FedEx account, so I haven't been able to obsessively sit at the computer and check the status of our paperwork, so it was great to read that everything we've been working on for the last three months is just about there!

So, officially, now all we do is wait. We'll keep you updated as we know things.

Scrapbook

Today has been a day of frantically working on our scrapbook pages. They are the final part of our dossier, but they did not need to be certified or authenticated. Dan and I poured over pictures of the inside/outside of our house, and tons of pictures of us over the last several years. Dan scanned several pictures in this morning, and I went outside to take some shots of our house. We sent about 30 pictures to our facilitator, Bonnie, and had her help us make the decisions as to which ones to use.

So for your viewing pleasure, I present our two page scrapbook!

Caption: Our Home


Caption: The living room

(And yes, this isn't exactly "our" living room, but it is in our house! This is a picture we took back when we were first considering buying the place. So glad I saved them, because right now...well, we won't go there!)

Caption: Our Wedding Day


Caption: We like to travel.


Caption: Our family.

Caption: Shannon and Daniel MacDonald

Bonnie and I have e-mailed back and forth about 16 times today, working on picture choice, captions, etc. etc. etc. I finally got everything laid out, and it looks pretty good!

I will be spending the afternoon at Kinko's tomorrow, making a zillion copies of our dossier packets. We need to make three copies of each one for the agency, plus another copy of each one for us to keep. We're killing trees over here!

Picture Time

I thought that some of you might want to know what a couple of "dossier"'s actually looks like.

Well, they look a little like this:
















And spread out, they look like this:





















The "Authentication" from the Vietnam Embassy looks a little like this:


















A close-up of the translation of the first page (the state certification page) looks like this:
























And for some reason, the state certification pages gets another stamp, and it looks like this:

























Fun, huh?