Milestones

Ok – yes this post is going to be long winded! If you are someone who has been involved since the beginning you can just scroll right down to today and start reading from there. We just want to capture some of the milestones that have happened since our journey started.

Summer of 2006 – This is around the time when we seriously started to consider other options to becoming parents. We spent the next several months just researching and weighing out all our options.

September 24, 2006 – We mailed in our application to China Adoption with Love, Inc. (CAWLI) in Boston, MA {Yes our original plan was to adopt a daughter from China.}

CAWLI assigned us Kathleen D as our social worker. We will be working with her to complete our home study. We had our first appt. on Oct. 13^th. Kathleen was wonderful. She understood how excited we were about adopting and worked very closely with us to finish our home study quickly. Oct 27^th Kami had her one-on-one meeting. Oct. 30^th Kathleen came to our home for our home visit. She needed to make sure our home was going to be safe place to raise a child. Oct 31^st Eric had his one-on-one visit. Also during this time our reference families were completing a letter to Kathleen stating basically why they thought we would be good parents. Thank you so much to those of you that did this for us! In addition to working on our home study during this time we were starting to work on our dossier. A dossier (a term I was not familiar with) is just a word to describe our packet of documents that we need to assemble. Once our required meetings were completed and paperwork for the home study, Kathleen then had the responsibility to write our home study report.

October 14, 2006 - We attend the Adoption Preparation Seminar. This seminar is a requirement for all families living in NH who are wishing to become parents via adoption. It was 8 hours long but well worth it. It was very informative and gave us really the first real impression of the difference between raising biological children vs. adopted children.

Beginning of November – things are really moving along and we are starting to make really good progress of getting our paperwork all together. We were also learning a lot more about the whole process of adopting. There was one huge thing about China that was nagging us, the long wait. Our agency was telling us that before our adoption “clock” could officially start we would need to finish all our paperwork. They expected it would take us about five months to do the paperwork. Adoption clock is the wait time from when you turn in all your paperwork to when you actually get asked to travel overseas. The time frame we were looking at for China was going to be at least two years but probably longer. Hmm this is going to take over two years but likely closer to three?? After many conversations amongst ourselves and our social worker we made the difficult decision to stop our adoption with China and switch to a different country. During our talks with our social worker she really broke it down for us all the pros and cons of adopting from various countries. She presented Kazakhstan to us and when she explained to us the process, type of kids that are available and why they were available our hearts really just opened up and felt more right to us. So the decision was made we are switching countries and Kazakhstan is it. Unfortunately for us we now had to also find a new adoption agency to work with because CAWLI only works with China. We settled on Wide Horizons for Children (WHFC) whose main office is in Waltham, MA but they have a local office in Bedford, NH which is about an hour from our home.

November 20, 2006 – We officially filled out our application to work with Wide Horizons for Children. Shortly after we were assigned Cathy B as our new social worker who would mainly be responsible for converting our home study to meet the requirements for Kazakhstan.

December 18, 2006 – We meet with Cathy to go over our current home study. While she worked on this we quickly started working on our documents again. The dossier for Kazakhstan was different than China so we were pretty much starting over again at this point.

January 5, 2007 – Submitted our home study & required documents to USCIS for approval. Basically this approval is from the United State government granting us approval to bring a child home from another country.

January 31, 2007 – We had our fingerprinting appt in Manchester, NH today. These prints go to the federal government for approval. They are our second set of fingerprints to be done; we have all ready gotten them done at our local police station. The local prints were sent to the State of New Hampshire to run a background check.

February 9, 2007 – We had some of our documents apostilled in Montpelier, VT today. All our documents had to first be notarized, then they are required to be apostilled. An apostille is a gold raised seal certifying that the notary who signed off on our documents is legitimate. Notaries are recognized in the US as proof that a document is real but outside the US only apostille are recognized which is why all documents have to go through both processes. {This is a process that we had no idea even existed before our adoption journey started.}

February 13, 2007 – We were granted approval from USCIS to bring a child home to America. *Receiving this approval is a huge milestone.

March 9, 2007 – We went to Concord, NH today to have the remainder or our documents apostilled.

March 13, 2007 – Handed complete dossier packet along with four full copies over to WHFC. Eric actually drove down to Waltham to hand deliver these documents because we were so nervous about mailing them.

At this point, WHFC spent about a week reviewing all our documents to make sure that they were all in order. Once they finished this step they mailed our documents to Kazakhstan where they would be translated into Russian and certified. Once completed our documents were then mailed back to the United States to the Kazakhstan Embassy in Washington, DC where they would get the first round of scrutiny. Three branches of Kazakhstan government will need to read and verify and approve our documents before we will get the invitation to travel to meet our new baby. The other two branches located in Kazakhstan are The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and the Ministry of Education (MOE). At any point in this process we have the threat that our paperwork could be kicked back to us for correcting. If all goes well we should get our invitation to travel by the end of July.

June 5, 2007 – We receive the very sad news that the Embassy in Washington, DC was kicking back our dossier for corrections. The documents in our dossier that needed to be updated or completed are:

• A psychological letter written by our PCP for each of us (We did do these originally but they were missing from our dossier.)
• Medical Reports by our PCP for each of us (These reports are only valid for 3 months and must make it through the Embassy in DC before they expire.)
• A copy of our PCPs medical license (This document is a new requirement.)
• A WHFC licensure to work in New Hampshire had also expired by this time so they needed to resubmit a current license. *It is not been clearly stated by our agency but we believe that the biggest reason why our dossier got kicked back was because of this expired license.

June 25, 2007 – Our paperwork was once again forwarded to Kazakhstan for translation and certification. *Our adoption clock has now been reset to this date. We now hope to receive our invitation to travel by mid-October at the latest. Unfortunately we lost 3 months when our documents were kicked back.

July 9, 2007 – Kazakhstan translation forwarded our documents back to the US Kazakhstan Embassy in Washington, DC.

July 15, 2007 – ** this turned out to be a great day in our adoption journey. A few of my closest friends that live in Pennsylvania lured me down to visit with plans to go out for a day of shopping. When I showed up for my day of shopping, SURPRISE, SURPRISE, Welcome to your Baby Shower!! What ?! I was completely shocked, clueless. But I loved it; it was so nice of them. It was really a little strange to have a baby shower without the huge prego belly. Plus it felt a little strange because even though we are so ready to be parents, it doesn’t always feel like we are about to become parents. Of course, the fact that I am a Mommy-to-be and still able to indulge in the wine that flowed through out the afternoon was wonderful. J THANK YOU Amanda & Deborah for all your efforts in throwing me my shower. And thank you to all my girlfriends that were able to make it out on that 90+ degree day! We received some very much needed items for our little one. I can’t believe everyone was able to keep it a secret from me, even Eric knew about it!

August 20, 2007 – Our paperwork was forward from the US Embassy today to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) in Kazakhstan. Our agency tells us that this stage should last 4 to 6 weeks.

October 16, 2007 – As of today our paperwork is still at the MFA. Our agency was told this week that the reason the MFA has been taking longer is because of staffing changes and training. They hope to get caught back up in the next couple weeks. We are praying they get caught up this week!!

We do 100% in hearts believe that God has a plan for us and that everything happens for a reason. We do believe that the child that is supposed to be ours is in Kazakhstan waiting for us. He/She is just simply not ready for us yet. Even though we do truly believe this the wait is still very difficult and hard to accept on some days.