Life After Child Adoption

Video Transcript

"What was life like after my girls came to live with us? Well, for the most part they were both four months old; one was a little under four months, and the other one was a little over four months old, so it's like having a new baby in the house for anybody. There's very little sleep, a lot of activities that need to be done just to get the baby on the schedule. It's a little different, because of course, you don't have the schedule. The the orphanage might have handed you a schedule, but now they're in a completely different time zone in our case. Actually, the time zone wasn't different, but the the whole way that you would run your household, as opposed to an orphanage. We didn't have time to do everything exactly on their time, so we adjusted our kids schedule to that. But in the meantime, you also have a lot of paperwork things that you're trying to get caught up on. Now your child is here in the country, and a lot of people might just do; I believe the process is like a name change kind of thing, where they just validate a foreign adoption. In our case, we actually chose to re-adopt, and in that re-adoption process, we got a lawyer involved, just because it was easier for us, and we changed her name to what we legally call her now. She came home with, you know, a series of names. They don't really change it to anything that you want it to be. It's whatever the birth mother may have named em', and then they stick your last name on the end, and do funny things. So, we gave her the legal name that we wanted to give her, and then at the same time, that allows us to have a Texas birth certificate, and then once you move past that; once you have your state ado, you know, certificate thing, then you can get a social security card, and in the meantime, you have to have some kind of proof of citizenship, because everything will say that they're born in whatever country they were born in. So you want to make sure that even though they legally are American citizens, that they have some piece of paper, so that when the little league that they want to join, or some program that they want to join has something that says yes, they're American citizens, and they're entitled to all the benefits of being an American citizen. So, that usually; it's not a fast process, but it's nothing people hurry to do, but usually within the first six months to a year that they're home people try to get that done so that you don't forget about it and lose some of the paperwork that you might need. But other than that, it's just like having any new baby. Lots and lots of fun, of things; of learning what, you know, what the kids can do and what they can't do, and watching them sit up and stand and do all those things."