China Adoption Paperwork is Driving Me Mad

I suppose in the interest of keeping this linked to a China adoption I should write about how my process is going, but it is so totally BORING and FRUSTRATING that why should I bog you down with details? Either you've been there before or you will be there, so I'll make you relive it or I'll totally scare you to death. Neither which is a good thing.

However, one thing I will comment on, is the amount of utter redundancy in this wonderful process. If I search for understanding (trying to be good), it makes complete sense to do backgrounds and take fingerprints and have a complete criminal and child abuse history of me. And then, OK, we do it again, for another department (CIS), for our orphan petition. Even that's OK because there's technology involved. OK, two sets of prints, two sets of clearances...you think we would be, OK, but, NO? For the dossier, we need a police clearance letter for China. The police clearance letter is really vague. It can be from the city. It can be from the county. It can be from the state. So, I basically walk into to my city police department and have them type up one for me and my husband for $20 a piece. It basically just needs to say I'm a good citizen with no record. WTF? Now, we have to spend another couple hundred bucks on putting all the stamps on these pieces of paper. Don't all the background checks that have been run this way and that which show up on the homestudy which is notarized, certified and authenticated and goes to China, as well, show that we have no record? This is what is redundant!

And, I also find it silly to have to notarize, certify and authenticate a letter of "non-employment". I write myself a two sentence letter on the computer that I am a stay at home mom and bring in the big bucks. Sign it. Now I have to spend $75 sending it up the line. Make sense? I think not. My rant for the day.