Bureaucratic Hell... (Nina)

Everyone warned us there would be glitches in this process. We'd been lucky enough not to run into any so far... until today. The certified Police Clearance Letter we obtained last week wasn't good enough documentation. It had to be notarized. So we drove all the way to downtown Los Angeles, hired our traveling notary to meet us there ($110, yikes), intending to have the police issue another letter which would be notarized on the spot.

Instead, we discovered the original letter shouldn't have been issued, since we didn't technically live in Los Angeles city. We had to go to the County Offices in Norwalk, another 20 minutes away - basically a descent into the smoggiest, creepiest, yuckiest part of town (no offense to Norwalkians). We passed billboards advertising stripper bars and drove past two sheriff buses filled with inmates. Once we got to the right office, the clerk said clearance letters took two weeks to process, and that they might not give me one since I'd had more than two names (as anyone who has been married twice and changed her name would have). Aggghhhh, instant freak-out. I immediately went to the worst possible scenario: I would be the first person on earth not to obtain a police clearance letter for this reason, and the adoption wouldn't go through.

Yes, I went there. And stayed there all the way home. An hour of complete anguish.

David, aka the most understanding husband on earth, tried to reassure me but I was inconsolable. We called Natasha, our Dragon Plan person at Great Wall China Adoption (www.gwca.org) and she'd never heard of such a thing (Natasha is wonderful and is saving our - okay, my - sanity). She offered to contact the clerk's supervisor directly to sort it out. David called the Supervisor first and explained the situation. She said we'd been misinformed and the name changes won't be a problem. She felt bad that we drove all the way from Calabasas only to get incorrect information. We've got an appointment with her tomorrow. Stay tuned...

UPDATE...........SUCCESS! We got the documents we needed! They only do clearances for the last five years, so hopefully that will be sufficient. What a relief...