Dossier sent off to Texas!

Today we finally mailed off our "new"dossier to get translated. I am nervous because our adoption agency has to do one finally look again. With as fast as we threw the forms together I am sure we missed something!! We will have to see!

And the Problems Start....

So up until now we have been working on approximately 25 documents that we will need to go to the Secretary of States office in NC to get apostilled. This means that they look up every person that has notarized our documents and make sure they are an official notary. Well, our adoption agency gave me what she thought was the new NC notary wording so on all of the documents I replaced the wording before filling them out and having them notarized. Today, I took all of the completed documents down to get apostilled and the wording is wrong! It was correct the way it originally was! So, we have to redo ALL of the documents! We know with every adoption, snags are hit along the way and we are just hoping this is our big one!

I71H Received!

We finally received our I71H approval today! We submitted our paperwork on Sept 5, 2007. NC is one of the longer processing time states (4 months of waiting!). This will allow us to bring our child back into the US.

HomeStudy Done!

Today we received our final homestudy in the mail. This process took 2 meetings in a Social Workers home and 1 in ours! We spoke with her on everything from our childhood, to our parents, our marriage, our parenting styles, how we plan to raise our adopted daughter. I thought the process would be dreadful, but it turned out to be a lot of fun! The social worker combined all of our personal and marriage history, financial information, and preferences for an adopted child to form our HomeStudy.

The Month of Paperwork

I am really glad I am a stay at home mom doing this adoption, because if I weren't I would probably be fired! Between all of the signing, notarizing, copying, organizing it is really a lot of work! We have employment verification, financial, mortgage letters, marriage license, medical records, FBI fingerprints and background checks, pictures, passports, etc that all get combined to form your "dossier."

Although this seems like an awful amount of work, this is way better than my last pregnancy so I am not complaining!! I was on bedrest for 6 months...although looking back I had it pretty easy! My biggest problem was on Sundays when there wasn't much on TV!

You're Adopting from Where??

So most people ask why we chose Kazakhstan. The truth is because of the outstanding care the orphans are given. The ratio of caregivers to infants is similar to that of a United States Daycare! There is said to be less prevalence of fetal alcohol syndrome and some infants remain in the hospital until 3-4 months old and then moved to the orphanage. The referral time is relatively short (6-9 months after you submit your paperwork), and the children are beautiful! The can be Asian, Euroasian, or Caucasian decent.

How We Came to Adopt

As most of you know, I am not the most fertile person on this earth. The truth is I get pregnant very quickly...keeping it is another story. To add to this problem I have a lot of scarring in my uterus from multiple D&C's. So 11 surgeries later, we felt God had a different calling for us. I felt so fortunate that I shared my life with a husband, family and friends that are all supportive of us adopting as well. Especially to my husband who just wanted to build a life and family together -- regardless of how that family was formed.

We are blessed with 1 amazing biological child, Davis now 2.5. We both knew that we wanted to have more children, so the decision to adopt was an easy one for us. In the Fall of 2007, we started the process to adopt from Kazakhstan.


“However motherhood comes to you, it's a miracle.” ~Valerie Harper, adoptive parent