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.