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 raise the replacement document cost from $220 to a whopping $380! THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY DOLLARS for a single piece of paper! So, I can pay $660 to get them fixed now, or I can wait and pay over $1140. Good grief. And it gets worse. I’d better get my I600A filed for our Ethiopia adoption, pronto, because the proposed fee change will take the cost from $545 to $670, and the fingerprinting fee (per person over 18 in the household) from $70 to $80. We adoptive parents are made of money, right. We just take it all in stride. Grrrrr….

Ah, but in the tradition of “If You Give a Mouse Cookie,” I can’t merely send in a request for corrected Certificates of Citizenship along with the outrageous fee. Nope. In our state, we must readopt in order to accomplish legal name changes and obtain state birth certificates, and our last readoption took a month and cost us nearly $500.

And once THAT’S done, I’ll be back to square one with applying for replacement social security cards which reflect the kids legal names.

At least the cards are free. Sheesh.

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