Happy Dancing

The last few days have brought wonderful news!

Firstly, yesterday our agency (Lighthouse Adoptions in Ann Arbor) told us we have a very good chance of of getting a Ministry of Education appointment on either July 8th or 15th. What does that mean? It means we get to meet our child on that day, in Moscow! This is the news we've been waiting to hear. We will find out for sure on July 1st, when our dossier is registered with the Ministry of Education in Moscow.

As I think I wrote previously on this blog, we decided to consider referrals for single boy under 2 years old a couple months ago simply because we want to be parents NOW. The wait for a little girl is longer than a boy, so we thought having a child at home would make the wait easier. Lorien (from Lighthouse) called me today to say that have a bio sibling group in Moscow for us to meet! This is the most ideal situation for us. Pete is often the more practical of the two of us, so he is tempering his enthusiasm until this information is concrete. We've been thru many similar scenarios in the past, but Lorien actually tells us what is going on. I now understand better how this process works in Russia.

Wish us luck!

Fingerprint Update

We had our USCIS fingerprint updates done today.

Still having crazy weather here in the Motor City. We're supposed to visit my mom, step-dad and grandmas this weekend. We're supposed to have severe weather tonight, so I don't think we'll be heading down until Saturday morning.

That's all for now.

Summer in Moscow

I am hoping we will be there this summer...the first two weeks of July to be exact. We will hopefully have an idea by the end of next week as to whether we will be traveling before July 14th. Keep your fingers crossed, pray to your God for us...we can use all the help we can get right now! I know that Lorien and her in-country staff will be working very hard to get this done for us. Our dossier is done- Lorien notarized and apostilled for us yesterday. It might even be in the hot little hands of the family taking it to Moscow for us this weekend!

I've started my little shopping sprees again. No bargains were to be had at Target last night though. I still got some infant stuff. I had thought we would be coming home with older children (2-4) when we were with Frank, so I really had not focused at all on infant things- bibs, strollers, cribs etc. I need to start looking into these. If we come home with a little guy 14-18 months old, do we need anything more than an umbrella type stroller?

Next steps are to send in our FBI fingerprint cards and to send our letter to extend our I-171H.

The next 8 days until we hear something will be excruciating, but I'm sure I can come up with plenty of diversions- shopping, sewing and gardening!

Exciting News!!!

We have terminated our relationship with Frank Adoption Center in North Carolina! I am not going to go into details of why at this point. Maybe in the future I will, and I can share with people through email why we made this decision.

The exciting thing is that we have signed on with a local, small agency called Lighthouse Adoptions. We have met with the director, Lorien, and feel very good about our new relationship. We should have our dossier done for them tonight, other paper work is in with them and they are trying to get us over to Russia (Moscow City Region) for early July. We have a better than 50% chance of having an appointment with MOE there before the July shutdown (The Russian bureaucrats take a 5 week vacation mid-July).

What you probably don't know because I haven't posted in a while is that we are now focused on bringing home a young boy (under 2 years) instead of two children. We just want to be parents, and this is the route that will allow us to be parents the fastest. We will then go back quickly for a little girl.

I have hope again. I had really lost hope after our ordeals at the beginning of the year. I am very tempted to go do some retail therapy, i.e. hit up my local Carters for some cute little boy clothes, but have resisted. I'm afraid it will jinx things.

So, this is our exciting news! Stay tuned, I will be posting our progress!

I'm Back

I haven't posted in over 4 months. Prior to now, I was feeling a bit hopeless, but we might be on the right track again, finally. Most likely, we will be adopting one child at a time now. First, a little boy and then a little girl. We sold my beloved Mini Cooper last weekend and I got my family car- a 2006 Mazda 5. We bought the Mazda for what we sold the Mini, so that worked out really well for us. I have been resisting buying little boy clothes, but I am incredibly tempted.

Anyway, that's the update for now. We have some things going on right now that I can't presently discuss, but I will update the blog when I have info that I can post.