Paperwork, paperwork, and oh yeah, more paperwork

I knew there was quite a bit of duplicate paperwork in the home study and dossier, so I wasn't really expecting the dossier completion to be quite as intense as the home study process.  Please take a moment to join me in a peal of laughter at my silliness.

 In good news, there is a lot of duplicate documentation, so as far as hunting down a bunch of information, we've only got four things left.  The part that makes it a little squirrelly is that our lovely state requires that each notarized document be certified by the county in which the notary has his commission before we can have it apostilled.  So the notary verifies that we personally sign our documents, then the county clerks certify that the notary could, in fact, verify said documents, and then the Secretary of State can apostille the documents to certify all of the previous certifications for international purposes.  At this point, either your head is spinning, or you are laughing out loud at the ridiculousness of it all.  I am experiencing a combination of the two.

So, we have several documents to take to three different County Clerks.  This afternoon, I was rather dismayed to discover that the notary at our doctor's office is commissioned in a county an hour and a half away!  I had to get on google maps and zoom out half a dozen times before I could figure out where the blazes it was, and was muttering darkly, wondering why in the world our notary here was commissioned all the way out there.  I called their office to find out if I could mail that one lone document in to be certified rather than driving all the way out to the boondocks in person.  The gent I spoke to told me he would take care of it, and even waived the fee.  Bless him. 

So, as soon as I collect our final few documents, we'll travel around to our various County Clerks (I'm sure glad the state is getting its money out of us with as many certifications as possible), and then head over to dump a mountain of paperwork on the Secretary of State to get all those bad boys apostilled.  On a side note, is it strange that no spell check recognizes the word 'apostille'?

I am hoping to make a quick trip - if it is possible to do anything in this process quickly - downtown this week to get our home study certified and apostilled (yes, spell check, it is a word) so that we can go ahead and get that to our agency and India.  Let the paperwork madness continue!