Well I'll try to keep up the momentum and and write again tonight, but I promise to go a little lighter on length.

For all that we hear about the horror stories that others have experienced as they journeyed through their adoption, ours has been relatively straight forward to this point, though I am mindful that there is still a good bit of our journey ahead. KJ did a really great job this fall keeping all of the paperwork on schedule and tracking the progress on what seemed like hundreds of documents.

For those unfamiliar with some of the requirements for international adoption, let me introduce you to a potentially new verb - to Apostille. Going beyond creating every document in duplicate and then getting each notarized, the process of getting each document apostilled requires that they be sent to the Secretary of State in which the notary is registered, and having that office sign off on the legitimacy of the notary - for a fee of course.

As an example - Kazakhstan requires that we meet with a licensed psychologist to ascertain our mental capacity to parent safely and lovingly. Following that meeting, not only does the report need to be notarized and apostilled in duplicate, but also a notary needs to sign off that the accompanying photo copy of the psychologist's licence is valid, and then the Secretary of State needs to validate that the notary who attested to the licence validity was in fact valid. It can be dizzying to track, and as I said, KJ did it flawlessly.

So initially there was a flury of activity, and really since the holidays, we have just been in a waiting mode as we prepare to become parents.

So what do we know. We know that we have requested a daughter and that we have requested 'as young as possible' and 'as heatlthy as possible'. In the application process there is a sheet with a long list of deformities, conditions and illnesses to which you are asked to check a box indicationg either yes, no or maybe you would consider this child. It is a real challenge to answer.

On the one hand you want to be compassionate and understanding and in some ways say yes to everything, for surely birth parents don't have the luxury of filling out such a request, though on the other hand there was a feeling that if I say yes to something, am I all but requesting it? I feel willing to take the same odds that birth parents do when they have a child, but felt reluctant to say yes to too many things for fear that all my yes boxes would be present in our child. It seemed against my spirit to indicate that I would not consider a child with something, but in the end we did. Our adoption agency helped us to feel better about this, but the shame of this still affects me to some degree. Moving on!

'As young as possible' will most likely mean a child somewhere in the range of 8-14 months old. In fact many of the children that we read about coming home from Kaz lately seem to be in the 8-11 month range. The reality is that we won't know until we meet her. In fact that goes for most everything about her. It seems most likely that we will travel to Kaz without any information about a specific child and may in fact be shown more than one. Again it seems a strange concept for those that want to believe the fate aspect of the one child being meant for you.

Do I think that there is a girl in Kaz right now as I sit here writing that is our daughter - yes I do. I think both KJ and I will know right away that she was meant to be with us, but the idea that it may not be the first girl we see is very strange. Is there a chance that we would see a child and feel nothing, or at least not be sure and ask to see another child. I suppose it is possible, but again, what a surreal idea given that these are humans. It is not in our natue to 'select' a child, though perhaps the same could said of our decsion not to have our own children but to adopt instead.

Unlike many who go through the adoption process we feel confident that we could have conceived children but felt a greater desire to adopt. It has long been my feeling that there is no shortage of children in the world such that I needed to help create my own to put the world in balance, but instead that there is indeed a shortage of willing and capable parents to raise these children. That our first daughter will come from Kazakhstan will always be important, but that she is a aware of her place in the greater whole of humanity will be equally important.

I feel myself beginning to get get carried away, so I will call it a day and go spend some time with KJ and the dogs. More later. Take Care.

It is our hope that our blog will help inform friends, family, and others who are interested, about our adoption experience.

Our adoption process has been going on behind the scenes for a long while now and I have been meaning to update our blog for many weeks. I don't know quite where to begin and, believing that this is why we have not written sooner, have decided to just jump in and start writing and trust that those who know us will be interested enough to just come along for the ride.

Certain that there is no correct place to begin, I'll say that while KJ and I had been talking about adopting for several years, the idea began to solidify last spring in Atlanta at the wedding of our dear friends Caroline and Winston. There we spent time with a young girl who had recently been adopted from Nepal, and we came home from that weekend more sure than ever that international adoption was the route we wanted to go to begin our family. The summer passed quickly for KJ and me as each of us took work related trips to Afica and then travelled there together for a family trip. It was on that trip in July/August that we decided to begin our process as soon as we got home.

We began, as many do, with internet searches - educating ourselves to the process and reading blogs of those who had already adopted. Oh the internet, what a resource! Certainly there is a lot of information out there, and while I will qualify ourselves as not feeling the need to read absolutely everything about every subject, blogs have been a wonderful resource.

Early on, I had imagined that our adoption would lead us to China as I have known several friends who had daughters from China, but as KJ and I learned more through several information sessions put on by different adoption agencies, China took a back seat to Kazakhstan.

At our first adoption information session with an agency from Ohio, KJ and I didn't have much of a frame of reference for asking questions, we just sat listening to some of the differences between adoptions in various countries. At our second information session with an agency from Maine, we asked a few more questions and both felt an immediate connection with Gayle, a staff member and presenter. We left that meeting confident that not only did we want to adopt through MAPS (Maine Adoption Placement Services), but also that we wanted to adopt trough their Kazakhstan program.

Our process began in earnest in September and by mid December the bulk of our dossier was complete. January found our dossier being translated into Russian, and in February it made its official debut at the Kazak embassy in New York. After making the appropriate rounds there, it was forwarded on to Kazakhstan and to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in late March.

As I write this tonight, I believe our dossier is still there. We had hoped that it would have moved beyond the MFA to the Ministry of Education (MOE), but in early April we learned that the MFA was requesting further documents. We raced to get them together that day and had them notorized, apostiled, and in MAPS Portland office by 9:00 the next morning. We were fortunate to learn that a family was heading over to Kaz two days later and would be hand delivering our new documents.

Our hopes were that we would stay on course despite this possible setback. Such was not the case however. As it turns out, we are one of three families from MAPS that are bundled together in the MFA's eyes and one of the families documents had not yet arrived. Our latest update from MAPS (27April), said that the third families documents were still not in and they were hoping that ther agent in Kaz could convince the MFA to release our dossiers to the MOE.

Historically there are just these three steps in the Kaz process, the Kazak Embasy, the MFA, and the MOE, and typically they take roughly two weeks each, but unfortunately, or possibly fortunately, ours is taking a bit longer. We hope to hear this week that our dossier is on its way to the MOE, and if so, would expect to hear a decision on our application at some point in May. As we have read on other blogs, and heard from our agency, the acceptance notification often comes with a timeline for going to Kaz that is often as little as 2-3 weeks away. If that is our experience, we would likely be traveling to Almaty in June and then travel to our particular region of Kazakhstan to meet our daughter.

Our time in Kaz will likely be 7-8 weeks and I will write more about that later. For now, hopefully this is a beginning and I will find it easier to update our experience more regularly. With any luck, photos and possibly video will join words once we get closer to traveling. For now we are getting excited and preparing to become parents. Take Care.