Wow. We’re only in the beginning stages, and I’m already feeling lost in the paperwork! In some ways we don’t have as much this time since we don’t have to have a full home study done, just a home study update, but since we also have to finalize our first adoption we have some things associated with that that we weren’t dealing with before. Granted, there aren’t nearly as many papers needed for the finalization, but it is something else to try to keep straight.
We still haven’t managed to make our way to a notary, so we haven’t been able to send in our initial agency forms for the second adoption or get our petitions for the first adoption finalizations signed. We’re planning on doing it this week, but I think we’ll need to set a specific time if it’s going to happen. When we were doing our first adoption, we just went to our church for the notarization because we knew a lady there who was a notary. I guess this time we’ll go to our bank. I’ll have to find out if a notary is always there during business hours of if it’s only a certain-times-of-the-day kind-of thing.
I hadn’t bothered pulling together the other things we needed for the finalization yet. The petition is the main thing, but we also need to have a copy of the Ethiopian court documents (translated version) showing that the kids were actually ruled to be ours in Ethiopia. We’ll also need to include letters from the international adoption doctor stating that the birth dates we want to change for the kids are reasonable.
Tangent on Ethiopia and birthdays since that last comment may seem strange to many people. In most of Ethiopia, births happen either at home or in rural hospitals, and the births are rarely registered. (I’ve heard that in the more major cities, births are registered, but I’ve actually not heard yet of an adoptive family bringing home a child with an official original Ethiopian birth certificate from when they were born.) In our adoption and the others we’ve seen happen in friends’ families, the children are assigned a birth date by someone when the court date happens, so a birth certificate is issued at that time naming the adoptive parents as the child’s parents and assigning the children a date of birth. (In case you’re wondering, birthdays are not largely celebrated in Ethiopia. Just one of many cultural differences.) The person assigning birthdays gives their best guesstimate on a child’s age, but the older the child is the harder it is to guess their age, especially since many of these children came from malnourishment and are very small for their ages. They try, though. Once the child comes home to their adoptive family, many adoptive parents then choose to change the birth date to reflect what seems to be more accurate based on a child’s progression since having a more balanced nutrition and all of the things that go along with it. The new age is usually determined by the parents and a doctor based on various assessments which could include bone age testing (which isn’t accurate until the kids have been home for 12 to 18 months), dental status (though this varies by area of the world and nutrition so it can’t be solely relied upon for determining age), and developmental milestones.
In our case, we think the birth dates our children were given were close to accurate, but we want to change them slightly. For Desta, we’re moving her birthday back (forward?) from April of 2005 to November of 2004 for a couple of reasons. First of all, as many of you parents out there know, there’s a lot of developmental things that happen in these preschool years. It seemed pretty clear to us after she was home for only a month or two that she was older than the assigned age even though in looks the age fit her pretty well. The international adoption doctor agreed with us based on her gross motor skills and her communication abilities. We didn’t, however, want to move her up so much that she would be in a different school year. We chose November partly because we already have two October birthdays, so we figured it’d be nice to give her a birth month separate from them to spread things out a bit. Sound arbitrary? To a certain extent it is. But what else can you do? We’re really doing the same thing the person in Ethiopia did and giving our best guesstimate. We’re just doing it having had a bit more time with and close proximity to the child in order to perhaps make a more educated guess.
In Eli’s case, the family had actually told the orphanage his birth date when they dropped him off (June of 2006), but for some reason that information wasn’t passed along to the person determining birthdays in the court. He was assigned a birth date of July 2006, which wasn’t too far off. We wouldn’t bother changing it at all, but these kids lose so much when they come over that we want to let him keep as much as he can from his Ethiopian life. Since the family actually said his birth date when they dropped him off (which is fairly rare), we don’t want to take that away from him.
All that to say we’re trying to change their birth dates a little bit, so we needed letters from the doctor supporting that decision. I’ve been informed that those letters should get to us this week. At that point, we should have within our grasp everything we need to petition the courts for an adoption finalization hearing.
I’m not sure how long it’ll take to actually get a court date after that, but hopefully it won’t be more than a couple of months. In the meantime, I know we can start gathering papers for our dossier for the second adoption, but I’m not sure what else we can do. I need to find out if we can submit our i-600A to Immigration and get our fingerprints done or if we have to wait until the finalization is done first. Since the fingerprinting can sometimes take a while (another thing where you send papers in and then have to wait for them to assign you a date), I’m hoping we can do that while we’re waiting for the finalization to happen, but I suspect we may have to wait.
*sigh*
Thank God for file folders.