Things Change

Our social worker with Bethany e-mailed us some bad news. Night Lite, the agency Bethany uses to complete adoptions in St. Petersburg lost their accreditation in Russia. After talking with our social worker about the difficulties Night Lite has had keeping their accreditation we decided to continue the process through Dr. Dubrovsky. The only thing that changes at this point is the location from Russia we could be going to. He only does adoptions in three regions in Russia. Two are near Moscow and one is in Siberia. Although we were looking forward to going to St. Petersburg we know God has the right child out there just for us and the location does not matter.

Must Watch Video

We watched a video today that was so good I wanted to put the link on our blog. I think it can give everyone hope that has a difficult start to their adoption. Watch segment 11 "Montana."

http://www.hallmarkchannel.com/publish/consumer/home/shows/adoption.html

Home Study Over!!!!!!!

Finally our home study is over. We have completed all the paperwork, training, and the home visit. It feels like we are actually making progress now. We have our Dossier Packet requirements in hand and are taking our I-600a and the $650 to San Bernardino to get approved through immigration to adopt out of the country.

The home visit went smooth and was not as stressful as we imagined. Eleanor, or social worker, talked to the kids about the adoption, at least as much as she could to 7, 4, and 3 year olds. It only took an hour or so. She told us the purpose of the international adoption home visit is to make sure the child has a place to sleep, and the home is safe. She said if it was a domestic adoption there would have been a long checklist to go through and would have taken much longer.

Well off to gather the Dossier paperwork. Keep praying for us.

Home Study Almost Completed

It is June and we are almost done with our home study. We have the Dossier Packet in hand and are starting that. We are very excited because Eleanor, our social worker, will be coming to the house in a few weeks to finish the home study requirements. We met with her today and the reality of going to Russia and bringing home our child is getting closer. We are realistically looking at travelling late next Spring or early Summer. We also found out that we are an good fit to adopt out of the St. Petersburg area. I am excited to be able to learn about the region he will be from and to learn about his heritage. Charity is excited because that means a nice hotel. We are looking at about a $26,000 before our travel. We will be able to apply for grants and loans after the home study is completely done. We know God will provide us the money for this child. Please keep us in your prayers.

First Meeting

We had our first meeting on Thursday with the adoption agency. We were able to get a lot of questions answered. It was good to be able to discuss the process with someone rather than read it on a web site. They were also able to provide a total cost from a previous Russian adoption that happened in the past few months. It was good to not feel like you don't know what is going on. The social worker was encouraging and believes we have a very good chance of getting a refferal for a child quickly after all of our paperwork is completed. We are in for a long process but it will be worth it when we bring home our child.

1st Meeting

We are meeting with the adoption agency on Thursday for the first time. We hope we can get things started and have some questions answered. Keep us in your prayers as we go through this process.

Adoption agency

We are using Bethany Christian Services as our adoption agency. If you want to see what the process is for international adoptions go to their web page www.bethany.org

Adopting!

We started this blog to let everyone see every step of our experience adopting a child from Russia. We are very excited and we want to share this experience with everyone we know. We hope you keep us in your prayers through this long process.