The Reynold's Wrap

I can not believe the amount of paperwork.   Teenagers can make a baby without any paperwork whatsoever.  It takes very few sheets of paper to have a baby murdered in the womb.  Adoption, on the other hand, requires roughly 45,294 pieces of paper - each of which must be filled correctly (blue ink on lines 1,3,12, and 17, black ink everywhere else, except for line 14, which must be in chartreuse), signed, notarized, stamped by a government employee who only works between 1:45p and 2:00p every other Tuesday, sealed, approved, apostilled, blessed by his eminence, and touched by the right rear foot of the Peruvian lesser-spotted weasel (currently highly endangered).  And we are *still* collecting paperwork with no end in sight.

We have decided to go for a second child at the same time.  If we got home with the first and then decided to adopt again,  we have to go through all the administrative overhead (flights, translations expenses, etc) and paperwork (see above) again.  It helps deal with the problem I had from the beginning.  How do we go into an orphanage and say "that one" and ignore all the others?

There is a story about an old man and a boy walking along the beach.  The tide had gone out and the beach was littered with starfish.  As they walked, the boy often stooped to pick up starfish and throw them back into the ocean.  "Why do you do that?" the old man asked.  "You can't possibly save enough to make a difference."  The boy bent and scooped another starfish up and hurled it back into the sea. "Made a difference to that one" he said.

--Ezra