WHERE HAVE WE BEEN?

1 Corinthians 3
3:10
By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds.



Since I just created this Blog, I will be updating everyone with our family news of the past year and bring you to date as we anticipate our travel to Ukraine. We hope to receive an appointment date by the end of the summer. Thank you all for your patience as I recollect these events.

To begin, we began with our Home study and it was completed at the end of July 2006, approving us to adopt 2 children. Simultaneously, during this process we gathered all of the other documents required by the Ukraine authorities. These were items such as our marriage certificate, comprehensive medical examinations, financial statements, photos of family and home, petition to adopt, commitment to complete post -placement reports, FBI fingerprints (our home study also included State fingerprints and clearance), Immigration approval to adopt (USCIS clearance also requires biometrics fingerprints which are hi-tech, just in case they missed something , I guess) , copy of deed to our home, passports, copy of first page of passport and a the list goes on a bit more. Next, of these documents must be certified, notarized, some require a True and Accurate form attached that we have to get notarized , stating that this is a real copy. Then after everything is notarized it must be apostilled (which Mark correctly identifies as "notarizing a notary"). This plethora of paperwork took us a few months. Then after we had it all done, we were informed that the new adoption authority in Kyiv, Ukraine the State Department for Adoptions and Protection of Rights of the Child , which I will refer to as SDA in future posts, is going to require that couples wanting to adopt unrelated children, must submit a complete dossier for each . In a nutshell we would need to send away for more copies etc... I felt like I was getting really good at this so I said, "Oh, well , just get it done."

Now it was October by the time our 2 dossiers arrived in Ukraine and were being translated to Russian. Since there had been significant changes with the adoption authority, they would not be accepting new dossiers from foreign , prospective adoptive parents (yep, we are foreigners!) until January 2007. So we began a new phase of waiting.

We used this time to begin to rearrange bedrooms since our home has stairs at every entrance, we researched our options of making the house wheelchair accessible. Since our home is too small to accommodate an elevator shaft the solution was a new deck and ramp to the main level. Mark and I moved our bedroom to the second level and decorated the master bedroom for our new boys.