A Book of A Life

The first thing a person must do when embarking upon an international adoption rollercoaster is to design a personal method for keeping things organized.

This is quite possibly the most difficult aspect of the process for people like me for whom organization might as well be a four letter word.  But the sheer volume of paperwork involved demands that it be so, and thus I created this notebook which has since become essentially my 5th child.

And really, when you think about it, it IS my 5th child.  It IS Tanner's future, in those three rings.  It is his Life-book.  Every piece inside of it essential to the puzzle of bringing him home to his family.  It has come to mean so much to me these last few months, as I carry it from place to place, appointment to appointment, notary to apostille.  Every week watching the binder get fatter and fuller as the pages were collected one by painstaking-one has been incredible.

Tanner's Life-book looks like This:

Pen pouch: In order to always be prepared with the necessary BLUE pens required for signing all documents.

Check lists. (The state of the checklist itself should give you SOME clue in to my organizational skills. Don't ask, I know what all those marks mean!)

Divided tabs:

Not too shabby for an Anything-BUT-Type-A personality like me.  It got the job done anyhow.

Today, it finally reached maximum capacity.  All our papers (minus the I-171H which we still need from USCIS) are notarized and apostilled.

This is an apostille, for all of you who are curious:

Today, when I walked in to the Secretary of State's office for this final step I had an entire prepared speech.  I wanted to explain that while I was in their office on October 12th someone was robbing my house.  I wanted to ask them politely if they would be so kind as to re-apostille our documents for the reduced fee of $5 (which normally only applies if they mail documents back to you or you come back another day) while I waited instead of the $15 they normally charge for that service.  I wanted to explain to them that my heart simply could not bear to let those papers out of my sight for one single second after all we have been through.  Because my baby was depending on them, and on me, to accomplish this task and I already feel like I have let him down by taking this long.

Instead, I walked up to their desk and burst in to tears.

The poor woman behind the desk did not remember me as she was not the person I dealt with almost 2 weeks ago, but she listened as best she could as I sobbed out our story.  I felt completely stupid for crying, but I couldn't stop.  Even after she said she would apostille everything while I watched her, I could not pull myself together.  She expressed great sympathy as she worked, and asked some questions about our sweet boy.  I answered, but I kept crying. She handed me some tissue. It was incredibly embarrassing.

20 minutes later I walked out with our papers complete and best wishes from the entire office.

And so our once little notebook is now stuffed to the brim.  And through the kindness of others this Mama's heart is a little bit closer to feeling healed.