Yesterday I received our Ethiopia dossier packet in the mail at about 11:00, and from the moment I opened the envelope, I went full steam ahead with my work! The older kids were busy working on their schoolwork, and I told the younger ones that today would be our “off” day (they do school 4 days a week and we have a floating day off) and that they would get to play. There were no complaints there, so I camped out at the kitchen table with my computer, my adoption binder, the new packet, and a pen. I made copies, wrote letters, adeptly printed notarial blocks onto copies of birth and marriage certificates (OK, so I wasted about 20 sheets of paper before I got it right), and filled out our... more

For information about applying for a social security card for an internationally adopted child: link

For a domestically adopted child: link

And for those concerned about the proposed USCIS rate increases, the public is invited to comment on the proposals until April 2. Below is the pertinent information:

Fees are increasing at USCIS. The following is an outline on how the increase affects adoption. Please feel free to forward this message to any agency, listserv, group or individual who may... more

Which leads me to the other reason I’ve been pulling my hair out this week. I appreciate the Child Citizenship Act, I really do. It was wonderful to get our newest children’s Certificates sent automatically rather than having to file a bunch of paperwork and submit a large fee. The problem is, our Haitian kids’ certificates came with names assigned by the Haitian courts, rather than the names we’d chosen for the kids. At $220 apiece for corrected Certificates, I decided to put this off until I have a spare $660 lying around (ha!). Unfortunately, I discovered that the United States Citizenship and Immigration (USCIS) department is proposing a rate increase (aren’t they always?) that will... more

Or, How to Drive Yourself Nuts in Five Simple Steps

Boy, when it rains, it pours! This has started out to be a CRAZY busy week, and I feel badly that it’s taken me a few days to finally get a post up. When I was mulling over some of the topics I’ve been considering, I decided to write about something that’s been occupying a bit of my time over the past few days: getting social security numbers for our newly adopted children.

Being the tax season procrastinators that we are, I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that I hadn’t yet applied for the new kids’ social security numbers. In the rare moments it crossed my mind over the last months, a cloudy of... more

The world tells us that having a large family isn’t possible to do successfully. Something’s gotta give. Somebody’s gotta come out holding the short end of the stick. There simply isn’t enough time or enough money to raise a large family and do it well, right? Interestingly, or maybe logically - coming at this from the angle I am - a 1998 Ohio State University study yielded results that scientifically counter society’s view that LDS large families suffer due to lack of resources. And I say “LDS large families” specifically because this was true only... more

The last question, about how we do (fill-in-the-blank) obviously depends on what’s being asked, but I have learned through experience that I can do a lot of things with a large family I never imagined I could. I won’t go into specifics here since the field is wide open, but trust me, if you can take 9 kids on a plane to Disneyland, there isn’t much you can’t do. ;)

Satan wants us to believe that big families are too much work, that they require too much sacrifice, and that it will be emotionally damaging to the children we already have to add... more

The second question I mentioned, “Are you able to spend one-on-one time with your kids?” is another one I wonder about. There’s no denying that spending time with your children together and separately is a good thing, but I can’t help thinking that the emphasis on “one-on-one time” and “quality time” stems from the guilt we feel about relying on childcare, and scheduling our children’s extracurricular activities as though they’re little executives. (And please note that I said “we” and am not being critical of moms who work outside the home. I’ve been... more

Let’s take the first question – finances. I think most people would agree that many of our 2007 “needs” would have been constituted “wants” in earlier times. Beyond that, our culture has begun to place importance on things that earlier generations couldn’t have conceived of. A good example, and a pertinent one in our family’s life, is the importance of college funds. Our children have no college funds, at least not yet, and many people we know consider this unthinkable. Our take is that our most important “savings” are our two-year supply of food and... more

And regarding mothers working outside the home, President Hinckley said in 1996:

“I recognize … that there are some women (it has become very many in fact) who have to work to provide for the needs of their families. To you I say, do the very best you can. I hope that if you are employed full-time you are doing it to ensure that basic needs are met and not simply to indulge a taste for an elaborate home, fancy cars, and other luxuries. The greatest job that any mother will ever do will be in nurturing, teaching, lifting, encouraging,... more

According to a demographic study published in the Journal of Population Studies in 1979, LDS women born between 1800 and 1869 averaged 9 live births per woman married at 20, and 6 live births per woman married at 25. LDS families tended to be larger through most of the 20th century, but began to decline toward the latter end. LDS birthrates are still higher, but have followed essentially the same trends as the rest of the country; for me... more