Sitting in Line

Well I only have one small peice of news for the last few weeks. Dossiers from our agency have started to move through the emabsy again. We still have about 14 ahead of us. I am continuing to be patient but I really hope we can get through this before having to redo massive amounts of paperwork.

A Delay in Plans

Well with all good time lines there is the caviot that they are just guesses. Our first major hurdle in the process we will hit at a slower pace than expected. We were really hoping that our dossier would be to the Embassy in February. I just found out it will probably not be until the end of February and possibly not until March. I am trying very hard to trust the process. I keep remembering with Emerson if things had gone any faster or any slower we would not have found him. So, I am trying to take this delay in stride and believe that it is for the right reasons.

This unfortunately means that the earlies we would travel is in July making it more likely that I will miss school making the process even more costly. Don't get me wrong, it will all be worth it, but making it all come out in the black will be tricky.

In the meantime I am realizing that our first round of documents will expire in May. When will I start on those? Soon, but not yet.

Moving Right Along

Well,
I have not been a very good bloger this go around. With Emerson's adoption I regularly posted every little update. This time I am really trying not to get too wraped up in the day to day details. The main reason I think is because we are so darn busy with Emerson and our other new addition to the family.

This year we are hosting an exhchange student from Kazakshtan. So far is has been a wonderful expereince for us, kept our mind from being too focused on the second adoption, helped us see what it will be like with a family of 4 and many more things. Our exchange student is 17 and a Junior in high school. He and Emerson get along great. We keep joking that if this adoption does not work out, we will just keep taking in exchage students.

On the adoption front, after many long months dealing with Alabama buracracy our homestudy was finaly completed on October 20th. Mind you this is after having all of our part complete June 10th. We recived our USCIS clearance on Nov 13. We turned in our Dossier to our agency on Dec. 1st and the we recived our FBI prints on December 15th.

Our dossier is currently being translated and at the begining of Febuary we will mail our Medical Letters and the FBI prints. Hopefuly by Feb 15th our paperwork will then go spend a short time at the Embasy in Washington DC. It is still way too early in the process to know when or where we will be going. I probably won't be posting again until our dossier is mailed to the Embasy. For now, we just get to wait.

Here we go again

Well after much deliberation and after being on the wrong path a couple of times we have decided to adopt from Kazakhstan again. We believe very strongly that Emerson should have a sibling and that we want at least two children. After waiting over a year and a half for something to happen in Bulgaria we have come to the conclusion that it is not the right program for us.

While it was sad to get out of a program we are thrilled at the prospect of returning to Kazakhstan and we hope this blog will be much like our first for our loyal followers.

We have already sing with an agency, started our homestudy and slew of background checks and we are gathering papers for our dossier. Our hope is to have our dossier completed by the beginning of August and that we will travel sometime next spring or summer.

As far as our new addition; we believe in going to Kazakhstan with a very open mind. We are hoping to adopt a child 5 years or younger, either gender is Ok. We are actually hoping that our second child with be Ethnic Kazakh like Emerson. One of the biggest things we learned from our last adoption is that the universe is unfolding perfectly. All the twist and turns and random delays are the reason Emerson is part of our lives today. As frustrated as I was and I get with delay after delay in this bureaucratic process, I have a bubbly wild 2 year old that reminds me daily that it was/is all for a reason.