A long time ago, I said that my next post would talk about getting our paperwork in order. That was six posts ago, but here it is. Actually, here is the first of a series of postings about paperwork.
This stage of the process is called the “paper chase,” in the adoption community. This involves having a social worker do a home study, in which she writes up a description of our lives; having a physical; having criminal background checks; ordering recent copies of our birth certificates and marriage certificate; taking pictures; and getting permission to adopt internationally from the US government. Most of these documents then have to be notarized; then, the county’s superior court clerk must certify that the notary is authorized to notarize documents, and the state secretary must certify that the superior court clerk is the superior court clerk; and finally the Chinese consulate must authenticate that the state secretary is the state secretary.
Before we were accepted by our agency, Jackie went ahead and ordered our birth certificates. She was born in Maryland, and I was born in North Carolina. So by the time we were officially in the adoption process, we’d already started the paper chase.
Now, to get the ball rolling, we started on the home study. Hall County, Georgia, where we live, requires us to have our septic tank pumped and inspected. I went to pay for the inspector to come out, and he walked around the backyard, made sure we don’t have raw sewage percolating up to the surface, and OK’ed us, contingent upon our getting the septic tank pumped. I was able to get someone out to that pretty quickly. Unfortunately, he had to tear up part of our rose garden to get to the lid of the septic tank. Plus, once he started pumping, the smell was absolutely lovely, as I’m sure you can imagine. I think that it may have run our neighbors off for the afternoon.
But we were on our way.
