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A Note on Notaries
Saturday, June 17, 2006
I went on Friday to pick up our forms that were done on our physicals. For California (and I know most of the other states require it as well) you have to get a full physical done (with blood work) for your home-study and then a form needs to be filled out by your doctor, which of course needs to be notarized. It's just to show that you are healthy enough to be a parent. I guess they're figuring it's probably not a good idea if you have a terminal disease and you've got a few months to live and you go ahead and try to adopt a child.

But this gets me to the topic of day: Notaries. So, practically everything we turn in (both to our government and Russia) needs to be notarized. And that can get darn expensive, because things like this doctor's form needs to be notarized at his office. So you end up getting a traveling notary who not only charges you for the notary service (which is usually $10 per signature) but then also charges you for the traveling costs. And with gas so expensive the traveling costs are steep.

There are a number of notaries that provide discount rates for adoptions. For those of you who are going to be adoptive parents, I've got a link below that gives some of them, but you should ask your notary if they have any special rates even if they're not on this list.

Notaries with Adoption Discounts

Anyway, the notary I used for just these documents did not have a discount, but that's okay because I'm just using him for this one. We live in the San Francisco Bay Area (which is a huge) so I'll probably be using traveling notaries who are closer to the respective person where I need to get the signature done.
posted by Steveg @ 11:46 PM  
5 Comments:
  • At 2:07 PM, Blogger Jennefer said…

    The notary thing can a PAP crazy. Just make sure that the notary's signature matches the written signature exactly. Ours didn't and it put us back a month. We had to order the notary a new stamp. It was crazy.

     
  • At 7:56 PM, Blogger Jenni said…

    We got lucky with our notaries because my good friend is one, and did it all for free. My husband is also one, but unfortunately, they don't let you notarize your own signature! (makes sense) Wait until you get to the apostille fees. Those are what really drove us crazy!

     
  • At 12:25 PM, Blogger A Room to Grow said…

    Thanks for the link. This is one task in the adoption process I put my husband in charge... finding and then getting our notarizations and apostilles done!

     
  • At 5:40 PM, Blogger Elle said…

    Ok, your bank should have a notary that you can use for free. I have had nearly 50 documents notarized and have yet to pay for a single one. Even my doc's office has a notary. (met a woman adopting from China)

    Now apostilles are whole different story. $15 a pop in WA. We are up over $645 for apostilles at this point. Yikes!

     
  • At 5:30 PM, Blogger Hana said…

    I had that same URL for the special notaries who do it for free or at a discount, and last week I checked the URL again... the web page isn't there anymore.

     
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I'm Steve and this is my wife Stefanie. This is our story, mostly seen through my eyes, of the journey to create our family by adopting a child from Russia.

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