beR Mom
Ethan came back from school the other day with the following on a piece of paper: “beR Mom, IlCU dCSURSNS”. If you reverse the d's and b's, add a few vowels, and have Ethan translate, it turns out to mean: “Dear Mom, I like you because you are so nice”. I also came home the other day to a note telling me there was a package waiting for me at the post office which Mark helped him write. It’s amazing to see him learning how to read and write.
Yesterday Mark and I spent several hours getting the second annual post placement report notarized and apostilled. The post placement reports are the forms that Kazakhstan wants to get once a year saying that Ethan is doing ok. They have no way to force us to send them in (since the adoption is legally finalized in both Kazakhstan and the U.S.), but if we don’t send them in, our agency gets penalized, and governments are apt to use missing reports as a way to justify cutting off future adoptions.
This year getting the forms got very complicated. My friend the social worker signed the report (which I wrote, by the way). But when I tried to get it notarized, my usual notary, who will notarize after the fact, couldn’t do it. The social worker couldn’t get to a notary, so Mark and I ended up getting a notary to lend us her book, I drove it over to the social worker, and then we drove it back to the notary.
When we went to the state office to get the papers apostilled, they told us that the forms were missing a key “acknowlegement” sentence and they weren’t going to do it. (Apparently they only recently decided to enforce a rule that’s been on the books since 2004.) We panicked. It would take us at least a couple of days of work and a lot of phone calls and driving around to fix the situation. So, I got into full beg/plead/complain/cry/promise mode, not really thinking it would work, since these were full-fledged bureaucrats. I said that we were only doing this so that future parents could adopt, and that if they didn’t apostille, we probably wouldn’t be able to take the time to get them done again. By some miracle, they bought the argument, and apostilled our reports. Whew!
Yesterday Mark and I spent several hours getting the second annual post placement report notarized and apostilled. The post placement reports are the forms that Kazakhstan wants to get once a year saying that Ethan is doing ok. They have no way to force us to send them in (since the adoption is legally finalized in both Kazakhstan and the U.S.), but if we don’t send them in, our agency gets penalized, and governments are apt to use missing reports as a way to justify cutting off future adoptions.
This year getting the forms got very complicated. My friend the social worker signed the report (which I wrote, by the way). But when I tried to get it notarized, my usual notary, who will notarize after the fact, couldn’t do it. The social worker couldn’t get to a notary, so Mark and I ended up getting a notary to lend us her book, I drove it over to the social worker, and then we drove it back to the notary.
When we went to the state office to get the papers apostilled, they told us that the forms were missing a key “acknowlegement” sentence and they weren’t going to do it. (Apparently they only recently decided to enforce a rule that’s been on the books since 2004.) We panicked. It would take us at least a couple of days of work and a lot of phone calls and driving around to fix the situation. So, I got into full beg/plead/complain/cry/promise mode, not really thinking it would work, since these were full-fledged bureaucrats. I said that we were only doing this so that future parents could adopt, and that if they didn’t apostille, we probably wouldn’t be able to take the time to get them done again. By some miracle, they bought the argument, and apostilled our reports. Whew!
posted by AttitudeAdopt | 6:40 PM
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