Finally Finalized! | Ay Mama!

When you talk about the adoption process, many words come to mind. ?Birthmother,? ?baby,? and ?travel? are just a few that most people think of. However, someone going through the adoption process pretty quickly learns the importance of another, less romantic word: paperwork.

There is a ridiculous amount of paperwork involved in adoptions, and at least twice as much in international adoptions than domestic ones. Background checks, marriage certificates, home studies, agency applications?it almost seems endless. And most of it expires after a certain period of time.

Our Kazakhstanadoption dossier alone required more than 30 pieces of paperwork, none of which could be more than 3 months old. Getting everything together and turned in to an agency in time is nothing short of a miracle, and many families have had their entire dossier ? hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars worth of documents ? rejected because of one single piece of paperwork.?

Due to one single item on one single piece of paperwork, L?s adoption finalization took an entire 3 months longer than it should have. I won?t go into the details here, but you can imagine the frustration we felt at the delay.

However, it is DONE, and as of last week Liam Kubal is officially and permanently a member of this family!!!!!!

Words cannot describe how happy and relieved we are that everything is official. Of course, to us, Liam has been part of this family from day one, but there was always that little fear in the back of my mind that something might go wrong. If it wasn?t for the fact that we are in touch with Liam?s birth mom and knew that the delay was only due to paperwork, I would have been beyond a mess these past 3 months. Now that all is set and done, we have peace of mind.

This finalization also means the end of our adoption journeys. Don?t get me wrong, we will always be an adoptive family and the subject of adoption will always be one we encourage and foster. What I mean to say is that the process is done.

For the past 7 years, we have been involved in the adoption process in one way or the other. Now, besides Dylan?s post placement reports (which we now write ourselves), we are done. No more background checks. No more social workers coming into our house. No more having to keep a foster care license active. No more having to redo paperwork.

Best of all, no more waiting for our family to be complete. And I can?t even begin to tell you how GOOD that feels.

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