Here's a story about our latest adoption paperwork adventures:
There's a packet of papers we had to fill out for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Jen is so on top of all this that I just had to show up and sign my name across the bottom of about eleventy billion sheets of paper (not true, there were only threeve billion). This is an actual preliminary immigration application for our daughter. Yes, immigration! This is all according to a big giant international agreement on international adoption.
In case you didn't know (and I think this is really cool), our daughter will be an American citizen by the time we board the plane for home, with a passport and everything. She can't sign her name, being a toddler and all, so they will stick her tiny foot on an ink pad and make a tiny footprint on the inside of the passport somewhere, which sounds so ridiculously friggin' cute I'm going to puke up pastel baby chicks all over.
So here's the meat of the story: our application came back, with a sheet in the front stating that it had been rejected.
This is where panic sets in. We start freaking out that there was some deficiency found in our character, some moral failing that was found, someone from our past was spoken to and they squealed about everything we'd done. We would never, ever adopt. Eventually we read the rest of the sheet that explained the reason and we smacked our foreheads in unison:
A page was missing.
A blank page. As in a page that is not even filled in.
For legal reasons, if someone else had assisted us in preparing the paperwork, they are supposed to leave their contact information on this sheet. Jen filled everything out, so this sheet wasn't included. Well, paperwork and official forms being what they are, we printed out a page, didn't fill anything in, then sent the entire stack right back to USCIS.
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On a happier note: we finished our parent training! Lots to discuss. For example, did you know that China is an entirely different country? With its own culture and everything? Apparently some prospective parents did not know this.
More later.
- Kevin
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