Starting a little late...

I've been meaning to start this blog for months now and here it is October and I am just starting. Life has been calm for the moment on the adoption front. We are fully approved for domestic adoption in the U.S. and our profile is with the agency waiting to be shown to birthparents. Now we are just hoping and praying that we get chosen.

The Russian adoption is a little more complicated. The dossier paperwork has been MUCH harder than I imagined. But after spending almost 2 months running back and forth from 3 different doctors, our accountant, town halls, DSS, police station, and many other places I finally have all the paperwork needed and it has been notarized. Now we are just waiting to get our I600A fingerprints back which were taken on 10/4. They say it will take about 4-6 weeks until we get them in the mail. Once we have those we can get them notarized too and then send all the paperwork to get aposilled by the state. That should take another week and then we will be able to submit the dossier to our agency. We are hoping to have that done before Thanksgiving and hopefully be a waiting family in Russia too soon after that.

I get asked a lot why we are applying in both Russia and the U.S. Basically we were planning to only apply to Russia and do an international adoption. During the end stages of our homestudy we were made aware of some delays and issues with adoptions in Russia right now. We are hoping for everyone that adoptions start going smoother again in Russia soon but in case they don't we wanted to have another plan. We will just wait and see and take whichever referral comes to us first. So we could end up going half way across the world to meet our child or somewhere nearby. We may end up with a newborn (if U.S.) or a toddler (if Russian). We are up for anything and can't wait until our child finds us!