8/10 - A Little Bump in the Road!

Rob and I got to the sheriff’s office this morning at 8:00 am and luckily we were waited on by the really nice woman who had helped us when we originally came to get our background check letters. She’s not the one who actually types up the letters but just handles the requests and forwards them to someone else for processing. We explained to her our situation and gave her one of our incorrect letters and showed her that they weren’t notarized correctly. We had to tell her that we needed new letters no later than tomorrow because we’re sending our paperwork to Latvia this weekend. As soon as she realized the urgency of the situation, her friendly smile turned into a look of almost desperation…like she was scared of something. At this point, we expected her to tell us that there was nothing they could do for us and that we’d have to come back in a couple of days.

It turns out that she was actually a little afraid of asking the lady who handles the letters to redo our letters. Apparently, that just isn’t done. She told us that there’s some lady downstairs that types up the letters and everything would depend on “whether or not she’s in a good mood.” Rob and I pictured some old crabby lady in a dark dingy smoke-filled room with only a small desk and a typewriter. The friendly lady told us to sit tight and she would do her best to talk to the cranky woman. We waited and waited and soon afterwards she came back with new letters so I guess that woman was having a good day. She had done one new letter for Rob and one for me. That was great except we needed TWO letters each!! So then we had to explain that we needed one more letter for each of us. The poor woman looked overwrought and told us you just don’t understand…”going down there to talk to that woman is like cutting ice with a butter knife.” Those were her exact words…no joke!! Nevertheless, she went down there again for us and eventually came back with our additional letters. WHEW!!! We thanked her over and over and would’ve given her a big bear hug if it weren’t for the big glass window between us. She just smiled and said she was just happy that we were adopting and wished us well. What a nice lady!!

Now that we had our new letters, I took them right away to be apostilled. Since everything was in order this time, they apostilled them with no problem. With that, our dossier is now complete!!! YIPPEE!! Now, to get our paperwork to Latvia!