1 Year from Signing with Agency

Well March marks the 1 year anniversary of signing with our agency. Also the 5th of September marks the 6 month date from the time that all of our paperwork was submitted to Perm, Russia. I know that others may have waited longer, but it is starting to feel like an eternity. The waiting phase is very hard because we have no control over anything that happens. Right now we are kind of in limbo. We can not make plans for more than 2 weeks out as we are hoping for the call any day. Especially after having a referral then losing it just a few days later. So here is to hoping that all goes well and things get back on track. This waiting period is hard. I know that the next waiting period will be even worse but still just hope that we get the call for the referral and get to travel soon. Originally we thought that both trips would be in the winter -- Now we're guessing that trip 1 will still be in the winter, though who knows when trip 2 will be. Let us hope that it happens before the end of summer. I always try to plan for the worst and hope for the best, so the wait may not be as hard on me as it is on Ange, but it is hard on both of us regardless.

Referral gained then lost

Well these past two weeks have been very exciting. We received a referral from Russia on the 26th of January. Then we submitted some follow up questions to make our decision whether to travel to Russia or not. However, instead of getting any follow-up information, they told us about a week later that the child was adopted out by a Russian family. So at least the child has found a good home. Now we are back in the waiting game, and hopefully we will hear back soon with another referral. Of course that means that we are back to not being able to plan anything more than 2 weeks out. So we are still waiting to travel to Perm. Hopefully soon though.

[This is Ange, adding some thoughts.] I'm not sure I would have described that week as "exciting" so much as incredibly stressful. When I first saw that photo, my gut instinct told me there was something wrong. I wondered why we were being shown a special needs child when we had said that we were not able to care for a child with extreme special needs. It was with some shock to realize that they were claiming that the child was normal/healthy. I feared that I had discovered a deep buried racial prejudice -- The features that I saw as indicating problems might just be the way children of his ethnic background are supposed to look. I tried to find other pictures of people with that heritage. But none of them gave me that gut feeling of "something is wrong" like that child's photo did. Besides, we had gotten absolutely NO medical information on the child. Fortunately, Dr. G was available to provide a worksheet of medical & milestone information to request they fill out for us. That helped somewhat, to know that we would not commit until we had more information to work with.

Still, I was miserable in those following days. While we waited for the worksheets, I tried to get my head around the whole idea. Suppose the information came back that he was perfectly normal? It still felt wrong. My heart was telling me that this child is not the right one for us. I had good wishes for him, but I knew he was not meant to be ours. My intuition also whispered that everything was going to be ok, but it was hard to believe that. Finally, 8 days after we got the initial call, we got another call from our social worker. She was terribly apologetic, fearing that we were going to be devastated, but she had to tell us that he was being adopted by a Russian family. It happens sometimes that an extended member of the birth family steps up to take the child when they hear that they are being considered for adoption by someone else. I'm sorry for the child that it took such an extreme step for the family member to come forward (if that is what happened). But I'm happy for him that he will have his forever family. As for us, even though it was a little sad to have to go back to the waiting game, I was just filled with relief. He wasn't the right child for us, and we weren't the right family for him. I don't know if there was some unseen reason why the whole thing happened. Regardless, it's done & over with now and out of our hands.

In the aftermath, I have had some lingering worries. Will I get that same "bad feeling" when we see the next child? Will it happen to us again, that we'll be offered a referral and then told "oops, not available"? Another possibility occurred to me -- Given that I had such a powerful sense of Wrongness about that referral, will I feel an equally strong a sense of Rightness when we finally see The One?

New Year is upon us.

Well the New Year is upon us and hopefully this will be the year that we add a member to our family. We were told previously (End of November) that nothing would happen til after the Celebrations were complete in Russia for the Orthodox Christmas and New Year Celebration both New and Old New years celbrations. So that time is now that they are done celebrating in Russia at least for now so hopefully we will have something else to celebrate soon. We hope that the referral comes within a reasonable time. We want to be able to celebrate our new family member and show them the wonders of life. I imagine that right now the child is not in the best place that they can be. I am sure that the caregivers at the orphanage give their best to the children but that is nothing like a loving family can give that child. So we hope that they do not have to wait too much longer before they are able to meet with their forever family (US) well we hope that we hear something about the referral soon.

Post by Angela

Just checking in. I didn't realize Kris is keeping up with this blog. Cool.

I was just thinking about the fact that people keep telling us that we haven't been waiting all that long for our referral. Yes, that's true, but the overall adoption process has been REALLY long. We first started in 2004, as our fertility treatments were nearing the end. The last treatment cycle worked, which was great, even if it did mean we'd have to put the adoption off for awhile.

We probed about restarting adoption in mid-2005, only to be told that the country we had hoped to adopt from (Ukraine) was shutting down for a time. Shortly after that, Kris decided to leave the military, and it was a year & a half before he was out, into a civilian job, sold our other houses & into this one. Granted, it would've been hard to adopt another child when Cerri was so young, but our feelings were mixed, since we still felt drawn to adopt as we had intended.

Finally, last year (Dec 11, 2007) we went to an Adoption Expo in Washington and started over from scratch. We decided on a different country (Russia), chose a different agency (one that is local to us & has good post-adoption support). We didn't move very fast at first, but we decided on/applied to our agency in March and completed our homestudy paperchase done by June.

Completing our dossier took a little extra time, but we had it in by the early September. And now we wait & wait & wait.

So, we've been "waiting" since September, but we've been working on it for a year. And it's going on five years since we took our first real steps toward adoption. So, it really doesn't feel as though we "haven't been waiting all that long."

Well the waiting continues. We are still waiting for our referal even though it seems that nothing will be happening til the beginning of 2009. Oh well we can still hope. We did get one bit of good news that was we recieved our I-171H yesterday in the mail. So that is one less thing to worry about. At least we will be nearly done with dossier part 2 by the time we travel on trip 1.

Waiting and Waiting

So now we are in the waiting phase. We are just waiting for the referal. We have started part 2 of our dossier but many of the documents required for that have a time limit and must be submitted after trip one. So we are just waiting for a referral the waiting is getting agonizing. We are just going on with our lives knowing that someday the call will come. We just hope that the wait is not too long. We are hopefull that we will have the first trip before the end of this year. Any little snippet of hope makes us wonder will the call be coming anytime now. Well all we can do is just wait for the call to come. As agonizing as this part is I am sure the wait between trips will be even more agonizing. As then we will have met our future adoptive child and then just hoping that all goes well to join our family together from across the globe. So looking forward to meeting our future child to join our happy family.

Dossier Part 1 Submitted

We now have submitted all of our Dossier part 1. We finally recieved our apostilled marriage certificate from London. Since we had the legal part of our wedding in England while we were there the apostille had to come from London. Well we also had one document which somehow we missed when we originally sent the documents to our adoption agency so that went out as well. So now we are back to the waiting game. Hopefully it will get translated and submitted to the Education department in Perm quickly and we will get a quick referral. We can start working on the part 2 of the Dossier but some of those things are only valid for 90 days and they want you to submit part 2 shortly after trip 1. So we will get what we can accomplished for part 2 but some we will have to hold out on.