So, Where's the Baby?

I thought I'd post a summary about the process we've been involved in for the last ... oh, 2 years or so. So many of you have been patiently following along with us during this process, and lately I've been bombarded with questions about our "progress" with the adoption, so here goes:

In 2005, we decided to adopt. When we got married 11 years ago, we decided that if and when we wanted children, we would choose adoption. At first, we didn't know whether we would look at international or domestic adoptions, but we eventually found an adoption agency we really liked, and they only worked with foreign adoptions, so that sort of made the decision for us. We chose Children's Hope International as our adoption agency. CHI works in many different countries, and we initially looked into adopting from Kazakhstan because the process really appealed to us (and also, we had a friend who had adopted from Kaz, and we'd spent a lot of time talking with her about her experiences). We really appreciated the child-centered nature of the process: you have to live in Kaz for 3 weeks, visiting the child in the orphanage for a few hours each day. This, we felt, put the child's interests first... letting him or her get to know the new parents slowly, and in an environment that was familiar to him/her.

But as we got into the application phase, we realized that Kaz was a fairly new program for CHI, plus we didn't know if we'd be able to get the 3-7 weeks (or longer) off from work that the Kaz program required for travel. So we switched to China. We gathered paperwork for a looooong time (that's a whole different story...), then sent our dossier to China in August 2006.

In April of this year, we both started feeling that we were on the wrong track. Something just didn't feel right about what we were doing - this was fueled in part by the ever-growing wait for adoptions from China. We were guesstimating a travel date to China of sometime in late 2008...??? After lots of soul-searching and discussion, we discovered that neither one of us really ever wanted to switch away from Kazakhstan, so we came back! We called our agency, recalled our China dossier, and they helped us re-do all the paperwork.

On June 29th, our new dossier was sent to the Kaz Consulate in New York City. Sometime after that (we're not sure when), it was sent to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Kazakhstan. During early September, it was sent to the Ministry for Education (which oversees orphanages). The next step will be assigning us to a particular region in Kaz. Once our paperwork is at the Ministry for Education regional office, we will be issued an invitation to travel to that region to meet our child! We'll stay in the country for about 3 weeks, then come home for a month while lots of paperwork is processed, then return to Kaz for a few days to pick up the baby and head home.

We more than likely won't have any information regarding the age or gender of the kiddo when we travel. We've requested either gender, between 8 and 18 months old. (Kids generally aren't available for international adoption any younger than 8 months.)

So we are hoping that we're in the final stretches of the waiting game. We're keeping our fingers crossed that our first trip happens before the end of the year.