paperwork shmaperwork

Believe it or not, I just got around to truly organizing all of our adoption paperwork last night (tsk, tsk.) Up until now I just had our things in various folders, all kept in the same drawer. We at Chez M de P are no strangers to mounds of paperwork - I filed all of the paper for Mr. P's immigration stuff (work visas, parole to leave the country, SSN, greencard, fiance visa, etc.) on my own without the help of a lawyer. It was a three year process and there was a TON of paperwork. For that, I organized everything in an accordion file.

For the adoption paperwork, I decided to put everything into a binder. I put documents into those clear plastic sleeves that have the three holes to place into a binder. I used tabs to separate different sections. I chose to organize this way mostly because I decided to do this at about 10pm last night and had to go with the organizing materials I had in the apartment. I used the following sections: application process; receipts/taxes; placement; health info; and finalization. We are in the process of finalization, so perhaps there are still other categories that I'm not thinking of... Basically everything in the binder has to do directly with the adoption and our agency, though I also put things in there such as her tax ID number that we applied for (under the tax/receipt section), and I've also put in health information that we've received from our family doc.*

I like the binder approach, with the exception that you can't really see the tabs so well because the plastic sheets are as wide as the tabs and cover them up. The binder I chose is already full (though I'm sure I have larger ones around here somewhere - I am both a pack rat and a teacher, so you can imagine the kind of supplies I have around here....), and I really don't know what to expect in the future in terms of paperwork for the finalization.

I'm curious how other folks have organized/are organizing their adoption paperwork. If you'd like to share your master organization skills, please leave a comment.

*This includes our negative HIV and Hep C results that we received on Friday. Hurray for a continuously healthy little A!!