An Interesting Day

"Interesting" is a nice, optimistic, cheerful way to describe today. There were other moments in the day when other not-so-nice words would have come to mind first.

The day started off rough with me waking up to 2 piles of dog vomit on the upholstered chair in the office. Awesome. Thanks dog. Sadly, Bryan sat in the cleaned up (but still damp) spots on the chair when he came home for lunch. I had the honor of smelling his dress pants to make sure he didn't go back to the hospital reeking of dog puke. Clearly, parenthood has taken away some reservations I once had about smelling things.

This afternoon I had to go retreive Caleb's Kyrgyz passport from the post office. It had been sent via certified mail by our agency after they registered him with the Kyrgyz Embassy in DC. I wasn't home when the mailman tried to deliver it Friday so I had the joy of going to the post office in holiday season and stand in line with a teething baby! I decided I might as well go to the local social security office to apply for Caleb's social security card since it was right around the corner. How genius of me.

Let me just say hanging out at the social security office all afternoon is a BLAST. I was there for 2 hours and about 12 minutes of that was actually spent applying for Caleb's social security number. The place just smelled dirty or stale or something... I can't quite describe it, but it was not pleasant.

When I arrived the security officer asked what I was there for. When I told him, he said, "Oh, the baby didn't get a social security number when he was born?". I told him no, that he was adopted internationally. You'd think the guy would say something sweet or congratulatory or something but instead he replied with "What's his disability?". HUH? I told him he doesn't have any, and the guy then explained that he thought all internationally adopted kids had lots of disabilities and 'problems'. For the record, I was really super nice to this guy and just said that we were blessed that Caleb was healthy.

Needless to say that really got my time at Social Security off to a good start! When our number finally got called, Caleb was on the verge of starving/sleepy/I've got 2 teeth cutting right this second meltdown. I turned in his paperwork to the employee who either said he was from Russia or "Cry-GEEE-stun" (her interpretation of "Kyrgyzstan") and also struggled with why I didn't have his Russian adoption documents certified by someone in the US. Sigh. In the spirit of Christmas, I was a real sweetheart to Ms. CryGEEEstun and managed to get this lady to finally accept all of Caleb's paperwork. Hopefully his Social Security number will show up in about two weeks.

To my Kyrgyz adoptive parent buddies - please tell me I don't have to deal with our government again now that he's home and I've finished the Social Security step. I'm crossing my fingers that our post placement reports don't involve the US government and instead are just social worker visits where we talk about how great our baby is and turn in adorable pictures of him. Oh and of course we'll have to mention in there that he gets cuter every day :)