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 confusion would immediately follow as I semi-consciously imagined myself hunting down all of the required documents. It was too much of a chore to tackle.

Suddenly it dawned on me that it’s nearly April and I’m running out of time, so I FORCED myself to dig out the paperwork I needed a couple of days ago. I started with Form SS-5, which says that each applicant needs proof of their U.S. citizenship, age, and identity, plus I need to show proof of my identity. These documents can then be taken or mailed to our local (ha ha – it’s two hours from here!) field office. Finding the papers I needed wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, but I began to panic at the thought of putting my precious, irreplaceable documents in the mail. I’ve done it before for passports because I HAD to, but in this case, I decided I’d rather take an inconvenient and costly trip rather than take the risk of losing the paperwork.

So, today I called the “local” office to try to make an appointment, given the fact that I’m applying for numbers for FOUR children (we haven’t yet obtained one for our last Chinese daughter) and given the fact that we’re going to be driving a great distance to get there. Not surprisingly, it was a no go. The woman I spoke with (after being on hold for twenty minutes) said social security number applications are walk-in only, even after I explained that we needed cards for four internationally adopted children. She then proceeded to ask me about whether they had proof of alien residency. Granted, we live in a state that doesn’t process many international adoptions, but it worried me that she didn’t even know about the Child Citizenship Act and that our children are already citizens. I had to tell her twice that they have Certificates of Citizenship.

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