Bubba Llama

We finally got around to getting new social security numbers for the boys. Every year at tax time I've meant to do that. We do have adoption decrees, of course, and even birth certificates with their new legal names and ours as the parents. But we never changed anything with social security. We could have just kept their old numbers and changed their names. But we were told by another adoptive parent recently that it would be good to change the numbers as well, because the birth parents (or grandparents or anyone else with the info) could probably track them down later in life with those numbers. How do I put this charitably... I don't believe their family of origin are the sharpest tools in the shed... but you never know. They might have been able to find them. And maybe the boys will want to contact them someday, but we definitely want it to be done on the boys' terms, not the birth parents'. If they don't want to be found, they should have that right. So we decided to get new numbers to protect their privacy.

Turns out it's a fairly simple process, and today we got Bubba's new card in the mail (they have to do one at a time because no two family members can get new identities on the same day for some sort of post-9/11 security reason...) Anyway, it's very cool for us to see his name there, with our last name, and the middle name we gave him (we kept their original first names, they were good). He's been "ours" for four years now, but this is the last little step to make the full transition. Kind of fun, huh?