It is official- again...

Weird as it is we had to refinalize our adoption. What? Really? According to webster.com, finalize means...

transitive verb
1
: to put in final or finished form
2
: to give final approval to
— fi·nal·i·za·tion\ˌfī-nə-lə-ˈzā-shən\ noun

So, if something is final/finished, how can we refinalize it? Does that even make sense to anyone? Anyways, we had to and in Ron's words we had to just "shut up and color".

Although China and the USA have agreed that Emerson is part of our family, our county and state have not made it official yet. He still was not officially Emerson even. We are unable to get his state birth certificate, SS#, passport, etc. for him until we went through a few more hoops. We had to collect (again) a bunch of the paperwork that we collected for our dossier back before we brought him home. They were not recent enough apparently. We had to have a court accessor come out to our house to ask a bunch of questions and to look around the house. Sounds familiar too, huh?

We were very frustrated by all of this. It was an insult to us. It was a waste of time and money. Nobody from our county or state made us do this when we brought our three bios home. What about all those families out there who do not take care of their babies that they bring home from the hospital? Yet, we are singled out because we adopted. Again, we had to "shut up and color". We just had to do it.

So, as of yesterday, he is officially...again...a part of our family. He is legally Emerson now. We still have to wait about 3-4 months to get his birth certificate in order to do anything else though.

The judge was nice and even gave each of the 4 kiddos a stuffed bunny to remember the day. It was nice of him. However, he is the one who made the rules on us having to collect all that information and have the accessor out to our house. Local friends who live in nearby counties did not have to do that when they adopted. Let's just say we are happy that it is done!

Finally, the county realizes what we have known for a long time. Emerson is part of our family and we love him.