A Few Adoption Things

1) Tonight was our 2nd post placement visit - whoo hoo! We love our social worker and her visit was easy-peasy. The third and final visit will be in May and then we can start all the paperwork to finalize Phoebe's adoption.

2) Speaking of paperwork, I hate the social security office. I called several weeks ago to find out what we needed to do to apply for Phoebe's social security number. I understood that we would have to apply in her Vietnamese name, and then change it later. No problem. I gathered all of the required paperwork and drove myself and two kids to the office, only to find out that because Phoebe's Vietnamese birth certificate doesn't list her birth parents' names (a requirement for the computer system used by the social security office), she can't get a SS# yet. Sooooooo... we drove to the IRS office and we've now applied for her Adoption Tax Identification Number (ATIN) so that we can do our taxes and get her college fund started. That will take 4-8 weeks, which means we might have to file for an extension on our taxes. How irritating.

3) Our medical bills for Phoebe's testing came to approximately $2,000. Thankfully, insurance is covering a large portion of that, but we're still responsible for our deductible, as well as the portion of lab expenses not covered by our insurance. This is one of those expenses not in the list provided by the adoption agency and I wanted to be sure folks still working through the system know that it's coming. We're not upset in any way - it's wonderful to know that Phoebe has been tested and is as healthy as can be, but we have good insurance and will still pay more than $500 for all the bloodwork and labs.

4) There has been a lot of talk about sleep (or lack thereof) on our agency forum and a few yahoo groups. We've been incredibly blessed and Phoebe sleeps very well most nights. She still (at one year old) wakes once per night for a bottle, but we're encouraging that to keep her calories up since she's a peanut. One thing that we have noticed, however, is that introducing anything new to her schedule usually means that she'll wake several times in the early part of the night. She will cry frantically until we hold and cuddle her for a bit. Then she falls back to sleep for a bit, and cries again. As far as we can tell, it's a security thing - we've changed her schedule, so she needs to be sure that we still come when she needs us. It usually only lasts for a night or two, but those cries are heartbreaking.

I've been meaning to post about a lot of that stuff for a while now. But I've had respiratory infection/bronchitis and Natalie has had a fever and frankly, my brain isn't working all that well. My boss specifically told me today that I should hold off on editing an article until the medication had worn off - ha! That's one way to get out of work :)