Optimistic?

(Note: Chris, there's a response to your comment down at the bottom of this post!)

Okay, I'm trying to stay optimistic here. After asking around a bit, I'm finding that it's not very common at all for the Ministry of Education to ask for an updated FBI clearance (especially since it's not set to expire for another 6 months). No one has any idea what this means. I called the FBI today - they received our fingerprints but said it will be 3 and a half to 4 weeks until we get the report back. Then we have to notarize it, drive it to Springfield for apostilling, and get it to our adoption agency. Then it has to make it all the way to Kazakhstan. I know that in the grand scheme of the nearly 3 year wait, this is a drop in the bucket... but it's not feeling so much like a "drop" right now. It's feeling like yet another hurdle that's adding another month or two on to the wait. I don't get this... I was feeling like we were so close, and now it feels like it's slipping further away again.



On a brighter note, we went to a really nice reception last night at our agency for one of their Kazakh staff who is in charge of development and humanitarian aid. It was nice to meet someone who is involved in the process of adoption via the development side of things. I got to try out my 2 words of Kazakh (I tried to say hello). Not terribly successful. I had a bit more luck with my limited Russian. She gave bars of Kazakh chocolate to the handful of waiting parents who attended the meeting and I was at least able to thank her appropriately in Russian! :^)



Also, thanks for all your comments about our goats! They are doing a little better today. They're pretty sore and not putting any weight on their injured legs. They're also not eating much (which is REALLY weird for a goat). But they seem calm and they like their new surroundings. Here are some pictures of them in their new "nest", close to the science center on campus:

We have several Kenyan students who have grown up raising goats, so I asked them to give our goats good Swahili names. I described the two goats' personalities to them, and they came up with Matatizo (for the white one... which means "Trouble") and Masumbuko (for the brown one... which means "Bad With People"). Pretty accurate names... Mata likes to test the limits of things and get into trouble, and Buko is really jumpy, skittish, and runs away from people.

Close up of Mata... she's so cute!!!!

The building has a door that leads out into this unused garden/paddock area where we are keeping them now... and the goats have discovered their reflections in the glass. So far, they're just fascinated with the strange goats in the windows. The computer network people (who work behind the door) have enjoyed the goats' company but found their constant stares a bit distracting, so they lowered the shade.

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Note to Chris: Yes, I have the same question (about electronic fingerprinting). Why CAN'T we do that????? I don't know... but the FBI insists on the old fashioned way. When we did the state police background check two years ago, they did electronic fingerprinting - it was awesome! Our local police department actually takes our fingerprints for us, then we mail them into the FBI office. The first two times we did this, they used this cool red ink (well, it was red on your fingers, but turned black on the paper). It was not messy and it made perfectly clear prints on the paper. This time, they had the old black, gloppy ink. The fingerprints were really messy - we even had him re-do Russell's because they were so dark and it was hard to see detail. I'm kinda worried the FBI will reject them and make us do it over again. Ugh.

Dossier Sees the Light of Day (????)

Yesterday, the MOE (Minstry for Education in Kazakhstan, for those of you playing along at home - this is the government agency that matches us with a child) asked for us to update our FBI clearance. This is the first communication we've had from any level of the government in Kazakhstan. Our fingerprints and clearances won't expire until August. So this leaves us wondering... are they just being proactive and getting us to run our prints again because our file is going to sit there until the clearance DOES expire? Or does this mean that our dossier is finally seeing the light of day and is possibly headed somewhere soon? We simply don't know.

What I do know is that Russell and I rushed down to the police station yesterday afternoon only to wait and wait and wait to get fingerprinted. We watched a woman come into the police station to get her car out of impound only to see officers "sneak" up behind her and arrest her right there in front of us... apparently she had a warrant out for her arrest! Sheesh! So at least it was an exciting wait...unfortunately for that woman. We finally got the fingerprints and I planned to send them off to the FBI first thing in the morning.

Except that first thing this morning, I got a call in my office (at 7:45am) saying that one of our two campus goats (which we keep for weed control) was found limping down a busy, main road not far from campus! So I grabbed a truck and went out looking. I found her, being held down by a friend from work who had gotten there first and was huddled on the road side (in the snow and high winds). Both of our goats been attacked by dogs and scattered away from their pen! So I spent the morning with my friend at the vet's office, getting the goats fixed up. Poor babies. They're okay now - but both have lots of puncture wounds and scrapes. They're pretty freaked out. We're moving them to a more secure paddock closer to the central part of campus.

So after trying to deal with that, I still hadn't mailed off my fingerprints... I ran to town (which is 20 minutes away) to get a money order, but then realized I'd left the required cover letter for the clearance check request back in my office. Ugh. Back & forth & back & forth all morning. Long story short... the fingerprints are now being overnighted to the FBI office. Whew. I wrote "ADOPTION APPLICATION' all over the outside of it so it goes to the right office (we learned that lesson the hard time the first time we did this... it took WEEKS and weeks and weeks to get our clearance back). The second time we did this, I wrote all over the envelope, and they turned it around in 10 days. Cool. Keeping my fingers crossed for that to happen this time, too!

Baby Gift!

I got the most fabulous, unexpected baby gift in the mail this week from my friend Lisa. For one of her very first knitting projects, she made a gorgeous baby blanket out of rich raspberry-colored cotton yarn. I totally love it! I'm so impressed! I'm such a novice knitter - I've never made anything bigger than a hat. This blanket is terrific! Here it is, over the edge of our crib, with all of our little kiddo's stuffed critters gathered around to admire it...
Lisa, thank you thank you thank you! I really needed a bit of a baby "pick-me-up" this week. (By the way, just so the WORLD now knows this... Lisa Jean was a Prom Queen.) (That has nothing to do with this topic or this post... but has everything to do with a long-standing inside joke that I just KNOW Lisa is really enjoying right now.) :^)

On the adoption front, there is mixed news. After a marathon phone call to my wonderfully supportive agency coordinator early this week, I decided that I would go back to work during the next school term (which starts April 1st). It is so hard to predict when we might be traveling. I just didn't want to risk taking another school term off on some kind of leave, and then NOT traveling until summer. So I put myself on the schedule for teaching courses next term, and BOOM! One of my agency's clients who has VERY similar paperwork dates to us gets an LOI (yesterday). Her travel dates are Feb. 25 to March 13. She got 12 days' notice! Wow!

I realize that this means next to nothing in terms of a predictor about when we'll travel. (For those of you not as embroiled in Kaz adoption as we are, the invitations to travel don't go in chronological order. In other words, it's not always "first come, first served" with this process.) But it's encouraging to think that other clients of our agency are starting to move through the process again (after a big lull with the holidays, etc.).

Stay tuned...!

Horst

Yay snow! I love snow! We got about 9 inches last Friday evening. It melted pretty quickly, but not before Russ and I decorated our yard with Horst, the 6-foot tall, Bayern Munchen futbol fan (note the scarf) snowman and his pet bunny, Kaninchen. And yes, Horst has raquetballs for eyes. In fact, if you look closely, Horst has eyebrows, since his eyeballs kept falling out and bouncing out into the street. Thankfully, his eyebrows held his eyeballs in place.

Tragically, the warm weather has not been good to poor Horst. He was listing heavily this morning as I left for work. I don't hold out much hope for him this afternoon. Ah, Horst... we hardly knew ye.