Alan was born in Puerto Rico… very cool… until you decide to live in America and adopt internationally. We have two original copies of Alan’s birth certificate (in Spanish) so I innocently assumed that we could send one of them away with our dossier never to be seen again. And the other we could keep in our records. Well, I’ve recently discovered that we need a more recent copy of his birth certificate. What?! Do birth certificates expire or does the information change somehow? So now I have to FedEx a request to Puerto Rico for certified copies of Alan’s birth certificate. The process seems easy enough… fill out form, include copy of Alan’s passport, send $9 money order, and a return envelope. The big mystery will be seeing how long it takes to get the certificates back. We’ll keep our fingers crossed… and keep jumping through these hoops!
Aug5
Road To Adoption 
…Is the original birth certificate in English or Spanish?
We had to have ALL our “foreign” documents translated into the English language by a “certified” translator service. Yes, even documents in Amharic that originated from Ethiopia had to be translated into English, then notarized, then translated back into Amharic…go figure huh???? But in the end, it’s all worth it once you hold your child in your arms each night!!!!
If it’s like mine (I was born in Nigeria), it took 4 weeks to get back. Good luck!