Our day in court

Yesterday was our California re-adoption day. Yippee! Regardless of which type of immigrant visa you arrive with (IR4, which means you are a US citizen upon arrival in the US or IR3, which requires a formal court process in the US for citizenship), the state of California requires the formal court process to recognize the foreign adoption. Between Christmas and New Years Melinda and I spent a nightmare-ish 2 hours at the courthouse to file our paperwork and receive our hearing date. I naively thought we were simply going to drop off some forms and did not prepare for a wait. And we went right before lunchtime! 90 minutes of crying later, we finally got to the front of the line to hand our packet of forms to the clerk. 30 minutes after that we were finally out of there. The silver lining is that we received a hearing date for just a few weeks later. And yesterday was our day! Some time in the next 12 months we'll receive a Delayed Registration of Birth (new birth certificate) listing us in the Mother and Father sections and listing her as Melinda Hui-Min. In the meantime, we have our official court order as proof that she is legally ours. The hearing took mere minutes, leaving us alot of our afternoon left. So we sped off, with order in hand, to the Social Security office to apply for her SSN, where we learned there's some 'discrepancy' with her immigration paperwork and they will need to investigate before issuing a SSN. Hmmmm.

Here's an adorable photo taken during our swearing in....I didn't notice at the time that Melinda has also raised her hand for the swearing in. Too cute!


And here we are after the festivities. We had the same judge who performed Alex's readoption hearing.