Bite Me, NJ Bureau of Vital Statistics

Back in mid-October, on a Wednesday when Ela wasn't able to come for Micah's session, he and I zipped down to the Bureau of Vital Statistics to apply for his NJ birth certificate. I was thrilled that the person who had helped me with Thea's application had not yet retired, brought all my papers and then some, and we got through the whole process and went home to wait. The wait for Thea's NJ birth certficiate to arrive was around four months, and that was considered very, very fast.

So imagine my utter delight when right around Thanksgiving, Micah's NJ birth certificate arrived in our mailbox. I went to the Yahoo group for NJ parents with children adopted from China and posted my surprise and happiness. . . .

. . . .and then last week a letter arrives from BVS asking me to return those birth certificates because they had the wrong file number on them. And the office sent an envelope but didn't even have the decency to put postage on it, considering it was its error, not mine. So today, after seething quietly about this, I finally copied everything (including the envelope because the person who had written the accompanying letter wrote on it so that it would come back to her) and sent it off.

Maybe obtaining Micah's passport will be trouble-free part of this whole documentation process. . . . I doubt it - and it worries me because when I do apply for it, I have to surrender the one and only copy of his Certificate of Citizenship. It is returned with the passport, but considering even expedited processing isn't really expedited, giving that up, hoping it doesn't get lost in the processing, is more than I can handle right now. And we're not going anywhere anytime soon anyway.