Hi everyone. I wanted to start this to keep everyone up-to-date on our adoption process. Our friends and family have been so supportive, understanding and helpful throughout all of this. We started our adoption process in November 2004 when we started researching and interviewing different adoption agencies. After considering many different countries as well as domestic adoption, we decided to adopt from Russia.

We have completed all of our paperwork, our homestudy and just recently received immigration approval...then, we decided to change our adoption region from Tula to Kaliningrad. This meant re-doing many of our papers and having them re-notarized. Thankfully, we have a wonderful friend (Katie) who is a notary and has been wonderful helping us out. We will be sending those final papers off to our adoption agency in the next couple of days. They will then have them translated and then we just wait for a referral.

A referral is what you get when a baby has been found for you :) We don't know if we will receive a referral for a boy or a girl. We have decided to leave that up to fate. We have asked for the youngest child possible, but it will be at least 9 months old by the time we receive the referral. So, our baby will be somewhere between 9 and 18 months old by the time we bring he or she home. Our coordinator predicts the age will be around a year old.

We just got back from a family wedding and reunion in Oklahoma...and as usual, I was immediately drawn to all the children there. I could not get enough of my little cousins...it was so great knowing that we would have a child of our own at the next reunion :)