Adoption paperwork or How we must kill a forest to adopt a baby

And the paperwork begins...

As we started this process we knew there would be a lot of paperwork. I think we thought everyone was being dramatic, I mean we have bought two houses and sold one, we know about paperwork, right? Nope.

Adoption paperwork is a whole different beast. For example, we will need to get fingerprinted at least twice if not three times…..because everyone knows your fingerprints change?? We also have to have background checks done by 4-5 different government organizations and have our birth certificates "certified" three different ways. Good thing other than a few speeding tickets (mostly Kim) we have led pretty boring lives.
 We should have had an idea when we turned in our initial application and in turn got a 10 page questionnaire and 3 pages worth of questions about our childhood, careers, marriage and thoughts on parenting (of which we had very few). 

Then we were told we had to schedule "document training". A whole meeting just to talk about documents? This won't take very long.....When stumbled out of Starbucks two and a half hours later everything was very foggy. Luckily for Brian, I thrive on checklists and getting to check items off as done! Brian also humored me and we bought an adoption binder (isn't it pretty?!) to keep the mountains of paperwork together.

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So for the next few months, my joy will come from making little check marks on the above piece of paper and watching our binder grow with stuff we are done with! :)