January 25th, 2005 Update
Just in case you haven’t realized, it’s been a while since we have sent out an update of our adoption. This past month has been a crazy roller coaster for us. After the holidays we geared up to get our dossier (the whole package of notarized forms) finished up and shipped off to our agency.
Despite our efforts, we still had not gotten Kevin’s fingerprints back to complete our home study. This was the only thing we had left to finish before sending out the dossier. We spent the first two weeks of January trying to figure out what was holding up the process without getting anywhere. Then, on January 14th, we got an email from our agency that turned our adoption upside down.
In the last update, we told you about the political problems that Russia was having and that it might effect our adoption. We figured that it might mean that it was a slower process than we had originally were planning on but we knew that everything was going to get worked out eventually, since this happens often in Russia.
What we hadn’t counted on was the news that we received. We were told that things had indeed worked out in Russia and that the adoption process was once again up and running with one minor change: the children who are available for adoption are now at least a year old and most likely between 15 and 18 months. This news was a huge shock and disappointment for us. We really had our hearts set on having a baby between 6 and 10 months old.
We knew that we had to make a choice; we either had to accept an older child or we had to switch countries. After much prayer and research, we chose to switch our adoption to Kazakhstan. We felt that it was the right choice for us and that God had kept the fingerprints from being processed so that we could make the right decision without loosing any money or even much time.
We got our new packet of information sent to us and already have the documents prepared for the Kazakhstan dossier (yes they are different for every country). We are still waiting on Kevin’s fingerprints, but we know they are in the system because he had to have them re-taken on January 21st. Our goal is to have the whole Kazakhstan dossier to our agency by next week, just one month later than our original goal for our Russian dossier!
God has blessed us so much throughout this whole process. It has been amazing to see Him working through so many little things, like delayed fingerprints, to bring the perfect child home for us. We really feel at peace with changing countries and have found that we might even get a child sooner, and younger, than we were planning on with Russia.
If you would like to see some pictures of Kazak kids who have been adopted click here:
http://www.worldpartnersadoption.org/ourfamilyalbum.html
Our prayer requests right now are that…
-We have no more delays with Kevin’s fingerprints
-Our dossier is completed without any snags
-We get quick CIS (formerly INS) approval
-Kevin is able to get the time off work to travel to Kazakhstan. This will be a hard thing because it could quite possibly be during this school year and the trip to Kazakhstan will take anywhere from 3 to 8 weeks.
-The finances will all work out if he has to take unpaid leave for two months.Thank you for keeping us in your prayers.