After reading several accounts of the adoption process online, both here and on the internet abroad, I must say I feel extremely fortunate to have had such an easy adoption experience. We decided to adopt in December 2003, made the call to the agency and met with them just after the new year.

We began to plow through the paperwork in January 2004, our dossier went to China in July 2004 and by January 2005 we had our referral and were headed to China in April 2005. The *entire* process took a little over a year, from inception to insta-family.

I marvel at the stories of bureaucratic stalls. Not that we didn’t face our share of possible hold ups, but we forged ahead with tenacity, the kind of tenacity that comes with being older and just not willing to put up with a bunch of crap anymore.

Here is our brush with bureaucratic incompetence that could have led to a stall:

After being fingerprinted in early May 2004, we were called 3 weeks later by I.N.S. and told that *all* fingerprints *nationwide* for the day we were printed were “lost” through a computer error. We could not be printed again until August. As if my faith in the government weren’t already on tenterhooks, the possibility of all fingerprints nationwide being lost was incomprehensible. The lost prints were not just those of benign adopters, but also the arrested, detained and felonious.

We could have easily sat by and bided our time until August, which would have put our adoption schedule some three months behind, and ultimately given us a different child on the CCAA Wheel of Fortune, but I am not so passive, especially when it comes to my prospective child and my expectations for how my tax dollars are working for me.

I insisted, they obliged, and we were offered new fingerprinting appointments with one slight hitch; we had to drive about 200 miles each way to the Washington State Department of Homeland Security. joy. So we decided to make a day of it, took the dogs and headed out for a fun filled day in Yakima. We were printed without incident and as this was the last piece of the puzzle, our dossier was then on its way to China.

Things have a way of working out, but sometimes they need a little push and chances are, if you’ve been walking the earth for a while, you’ve faced your fare share of situations where your stick-to-it-tiveness has proven beneficial and makes you an awesome parent and a great advocate for your kid(s).