Lux et umbra vicissum…

It’s a good thing I’ve learned to laugh at myself over the years.  If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be able to post about this sort of thing. 😛

You may know from a previous post that we received some court papers in the mail, but I wasn’t sure what they were or why we got them.  At the time I was waiting to hear from our social worker, thinking maybe she would know what we should do with them.

I hadn’t heard back from her yet when the phone rang Wednesday afternoon.
“Hello, is this Mrs. Fouse?”

“Yes…”

“Mrs. Fouse, when you turned in your adoption petition, you weren’t supposed to turn in the final orders.  You should have held onto them until the social worker’s report came in.  The judge didn’t look too carefully and signed the orders, BUT YOUR ADOPTION IS NOT FINAL.  You still need the report.  And there are a couple of papers I have here that you need to fill out as well to go with the final orders.”

At this point I started laughing and told her that I wondered why we had gotten the papers that we had.  She loosened up a good bit when she realized I wasn’t going to try to push it (you know… “But the judge signed it!  It says it’s final!”).  After that she was really nice and helped walk me through things from this point out.

So here’s the exact boo-boo I made: the petitions our kind friends gave us included several different sections.  Our friends may have mentioned that the final order goes in later, but if they did I had forgotten that part. 😛  I took the entire packet, updated it for our children, and handed the whole thing in with the other copies the court needed.  As it so happened, the final order (which was the last part of the petition files I had) I should have held onto until after the court let me know they had the social worker’s report.  Well, I wasn’t the only one who made the mistake, because apparently the people at the desk try to check through to make sure everything is in order and they didn’t catch it.  Anyway, not a big deal, but slightly more paperwork.  So don’t do that.

We’re signing a paper today that rescinds the early (and illegal) final adoption, then we have to destroy the papers we received before (though Joel said he’d rather frame them).  Our social worker said she should have her report in to the court by March 25th, so when we know the court has it we can turn in the final oder along with the couple of other papers the clerk gave me to fill out.

Actually, when she gave them to me I think she said we could drop them off any time and they’d hold onto them until the social worker’s report came…. but I should probably check on that.