We got the final set of docs from the agency

We were surprised today to get an envelope in the mail from the agency. It contained the last set of notarized documents we needed, along with the home studies. The next thing to do is on Monday get them to the office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth to get authenticated. Once that is done, we make copies of all of the documents for the dossier. We send in the originals and 2 sets of copies to the agency along with all of our pictures, plus we keep one set of the copies for ourselves (we later take them to Russia).

Another thing that we can do is submit the paperwork for CIS (immigration) approval to bring in children to the country. We had to wait on this as we needed a copy of the home study, but it is not needed before trip #1 so it is fine. This will take several weeks so it shouldn't be a problem.
Hopefully this batch of authentications will take no longer than the first batch.

For those that have been seeing all the news about Russia and Georgia, we have been told by our agency that this should not affect the adoption. It is in a region that is not close to ours and we shouldn't worry about it being an issue. This is good news to hear for us. We are getting close and something like that happens, not news that we wanted to hear.