I've already been to the window to see if there were reindeer - or perhaps stork - tracks on the roof, but as there is not yet snow, there is nothing to report.

To say that this is an exciting time seems trite. This is a time of uncharted anticipation and limitless speculation. There are so many variables at play - so many potential outcomes. Fantastic to think that so many questions will be answered in a split second.

How do you take it all in and process as fast as the information and stimuli bombard the senses. There will be sights, sounds, smells, touches, feelings, all vying for a place of permanence; to become part of the 'forever' record. How will my single memory do justice to the sheer magnitude of impulses.

Today is the day where KJ and I cross over the threshold and move from the seemingly insignificant countdown of 'lasts' to the limitless realm of 'firsts'. There will be many firsts today. It is a rejuvenation of life, a time for new beginnings. I'll stop there before I truly take on the sentiments of a Disney movie.

In other news, we got our DSL line worked out today here at the apartment and we have already successfully conducted two different video calls using iChat. Additionally we have carried out real time text conversations both through email and on Skype.

It is a fast moving world and we are thrilled to be able to use this technology to maintain relationships and share experiences. It was also great to see our dogs ears perk up when we asked them if they wanted to go for a ride. Deceptive perhaps, but heartwarming none the less.

I misspoke a bit yesterday when I said that we would be going to the Baby House first thing Thursday, for I later found out that we will be going from 2-4pm. That said, I still believe it is possible to be back at the apartment and to have photos up by 6pm here which translates to 8am on the East Coast.

Thank you all for your loyalty to our journey, your kind thoughts and words, and your love. We'll talk again on the other side. Take Care.

So we are settled in to our apartment in Astana and are catching up on sleep lost in the travel. Astana looks quite different this time of year than it did in July. The trees are bare, and in general as you would expect, life is just a little grayer.

The construction in and around the city is truly remarkable. I will try and do a count as to the number of construction cranes lurking about, but it would be at least 40 or so.

In every direction, a ring of cranes continues to creep outward from the center of the city adding new high rise buildings faced in glass and for the most part architecturally interesting. It is really quite amazing.

I know none of you are following our blog to hear about construction so let's get to the heart of things.

Today(wednesday) is a Christmas Eve of sorts, for first thing tomorrow(Thursday) KJ and I will head off to the Baby House to finally meet with our baby girl.

After we hold and fawn over our gift, I get to come home and play Santa for all of you by sending off little bundles of joy (in the form of Photos and stories) for all of you to awake to Thursday morning as well. That said, make sure you all put out stockings and don't forget the cookies.

It has been months in the making, and now we are but a day away from entering the next phase of our lives as parents. Of course nothing is final until after the 15-day appeal process that follows our court date that is set after the end of this first 14-day bonding period, but hey it sure feels close to us.

So to recap a little. We expect to meet a little girl 'as young as possible, and as healthy as possible'. We have been assured that this will happen tomorrow and that we will begin to login the first of the mandatory 14 days.

I recognize that I am writing todays entry with a little less flair than normal and feel as though in some ways I am just sort of on auto-pilot mode until the time that we actually enter the Baby House tomorrow morning.

All of my anticipation adrenaline is spent and I am just ready to move forward. I'm ready to, for once, have something to write about that isn't focused upon some nebulous future state, but rather from a clear and tactile present.

Let the seemingly endless drum-roll in my head finally lay its last stroke down and the mystery curtain be forever pulled back. Take Care.

Good Morning from Almaty. We are sitting in the airport café having a little breakfast and awaiting our next flight to Astana in about three hours. Things will definitely be happening quickly and as I am sure to miss details, I wanted to take a few minutes to catch up on the trip so far so as not to overlook it in the excitement of the moment later.

Our flights went very well, and we have collected all of our luggage at this end without incident. We had a ten hour layover in Amsterdam yesterday and had arranged to take part in a 3.5 hour tour yesterday that left from and finished at the airport. We booked it online from home and it was very easy and relaxing, though the desire to sleep at times overtook the desire to see.

Our group consisted of a father and son from Ghana, our driver/guide Marco, and us. We departed in a nice Mercedes van at 9am, toured around various points of interest in the downtown region, hopped on a canal boat and spent an hour cruising the canals, then got back in the van, drove into the countryside a bit and stopped at a traditional windmill, and then a wooden clog maker before returning to the airport.

Back at AMS we still had plenty of time to find a pair of the reclining lounge chairs upstairs next to the meditation center and fall asleep for a few hours. You have to love AMS. They really know how to provide for the in-transit tourist.

As I sit here in Kaz this morning the sun is rising over the snow topped mountains that seem to encircle Almaty. It is a clear but chilly morning with the temperature just below freezing, though it will certainly warm as the day goes on.

The reality of all that will follow in the next several days still fails to settle into our actions, as things continue to feel very normal and relaxed. There will undoubtedly be a tipping point in the near future where the accumulated lack of sleep, dramatic time change, and enormity of adoption will overwhelm all emotional and mental capabilities, and I will no doubt find myself a sobbing mess.

I expect I will welcome it, viewing it perhaps as an initiation of sorts into the realm of parenthood. Just as the passing of years makes it difficult to remember a time when we could not drive, or email, so too I expect, time will quickly make me forget a time when I was not a parent.

Likewise, just as it took me well into my teen years to even begin to fathom the notion that my own parents had lives prior to my arrival, so too will our daughter begin our lives with her memories of us. All that I was or did prior to this point will simply meld into her vision of Dad, and that person will be me. Surreal! Take Care.

First of all I want to thank everyone for their well-wishes, and kind thoughts

Well we are packed and ready with 20 hours to go. Now we just have to find a way to tell the Boys that we won't be coming home tomorrow night. How different their lives will be as well next time we come home. They have never really shared space - or attention - with a child. To be sure, it will be an adjustment for all of us.

We are excited without being anxious, apprehensive without being scared, and optimistic without being unrealistic. So many elements that have remained unknown for so long will soon be revealed. The mass of feeling, emotion, and expectation bubbling inside creates an energy that makes it difficult to remain focused.

There will be much to say in the coming days. Please bear with us as we settle in and move into this next phase of our journey. I know that we are all excited to see what plays beyond door number three, soon we will all know.

Details of the first few days may be a bit sparse, but by weeks end I should think we will have pictures and full accounts up and running. Keep us in your hearts and know that we are excited to share this with you all. I'm off to curl up with the Boys on the bed one last time. Take Care.

The countdown clock shows just more than 7 days remaining before our flights. In many respects I continue to feel I should have more to say - perhaps anecdotes of frantic scrambling and harried to-do lists, or of seemingly impossible deadlines. Our reality however is much more mellow than that.

Knock on wood, our most difficult decisions thus far have centered around our clothing choices for our court appearance, and which boots will work best for the snow and slush we anticipate. Hardly taxing tasks!

There is a calm and complacent aura around this journey that stands in stark contrast to the frenetic pace and elevated anxiety that preceded our trip in July. If one were inclined to believe in such things, collectively these are perhaps good omens, harbingers of a more positive outcome to follow.

Expectant families often talk of a desire to bring children into this world in a calm and tranquil setting. I suppose it is only fitting that the same desire be held by adoptive families in waiting. For all that our blog may not detail our transformation, certainly KJ and I are not the same people we were three months ago.

Apart from the obvious changes - new house, new community, new work environment - there have also been subtle advances in both our preparedness and desire to become the parents we want to be.

Don't get me wrong, it is not that I have been learning to change diapers on our dogs, or carrying around groceries in a Baby Bjorn. It's just that mentally and emotionally I've had time to process a little more, and in doing so, have found a new level of appreciation for the vastness of all that I don't yet know and have come to welcome it with alacrity.

Before wrapping up this entry I wanted to share an experience I had last night because I feel it highlights a particularly common, if oft-overlooked, reality - Few things are harder to answer than an innocently direct question from a child.

Regrettably I will have to paraphrase my niece's question for, in my struggle to devise what I hoped would be an acceptable answer, I lost track of her exact wording. We were talking on the phone about the daughter that KJ and I would soon be meeting in Kaz, and she asked "Why won't she be living with her parents?"

I fumbled and stumbled through something approximating misinformation and was left with both a slight disappointment in myself and an appreciation of the fact that this was but the first of many important questions I must be prepared to better handle. Take Care.

It occurred to me as I went back and re-read all of our posts yesterday that the blog format makes it difficult to scan for the basic outline. Perhaps I could organize things differently or give titles to entries or some such thing, but in lieu of that, let me just give a summary to date to catch people up on our journey to date.

We began to research international adoption in Aug/Sept 06.

Settled on our Agency and Kazakhstan in Sept 06

Submitted the last of our paperwork in Nov 06

Translated (into Russian) paperwork was finished Jan 07

Completed Dossier submitted to Kaz Embassy(NY) Feb 07

Sent to Kaz - Ministry of Foreign Affairs(MFA) April 07

Forwarded to Ministry of Education(MOE) May 07

Received Letter of Invitation(LOI) June 07

Traveled To Kaz (Astana for 3 nights) July 07

Received 2nd LOI to Astana Oct 07


That's as basic as I can make it. It is roughly correct, though I may be off a little here and there. To learn more, you can scroll down, or go into the column on the right and select entries by month.

As it stands, we are just more than two weeks away from heading back to Astana, and if all goes to plan, should expect to be there roughly two months as we complete the adoption process. As is customary with current adoption practices in Kazakhstan, we will not have any photo or information about any particular child prior to arriving at the baby house in Astana.

With any luck, our two months in Kazakhstan will be mostly routine. We will arrive and settle into an apartment that has been arranged for us by our agency representative. We will go to the Baby House, meet with the director, and meet our daughter.

Kaz adoptions essentially have 4 components. Two of them are fairly fixed to time lines, and the other two can vary quite a bit which leads to the timeline that most families anticipate of 7-8 weeks in country.


1 -The first fixed step is a 14 DAY BONDING PERIOD during which we will visit the child daily(except Sundays) for 2 hours a day.

2 -After the bonding period is complete we ASK FOR A COURT DATE to be set to request to adopt. The wait for a court date becomes the first variable timeframe. At times it is as little as a week, at other times it can be several weeks. Court itself is often a fairly straightforward process that culminates in the court's approval to adopt pending an appeal period.

3 -The 15 DAY APPEAL PERIOD is a fixed timeframe in which the court allows a final window for the child's family to rescind relinquishment. Upon the passage of the 15th day, the adoption is recognized as official and the child is now legally yours in the eyes of the Kazakh government. It is at this point where the child transfers from the care of the Baby House to the adoptive famiy. Up until this point, adoptive families have continued with 2 hour visits six days a week.

4 -The last step in the process is traveling to Almaty, Kazakhstan's former capital, to fulfill the paperwork necessary to OBTAIN A PASSPORT AND MEDICAL CLEARANCES to travel to the US. Often needing several days to complete, weekends and holidays can extend this to a week or more.

Our anticipated timeline puts this step somewhere just before the Christmas holidays, and we are hoping that we can complete everything before then, rather than have it get dragged out a week or more because of it. Time will tell. Take Care.

Well the weather has been rather rainy for the last few days which isn't such a bad thing when there seems there is much to do.

Yesterday I took time to go back and actually read our blog from the beginning. Like a cook who doesn't eat their own food I suppose, I have never really read my own blog. Once a newer posts is done, I've not gone back and reread any previous ones.

It is surprising how I have already forgotten some of the things that have happened in our process. Amazing how our memories self-edit - replacing fine detail with Gaussian emotions that normalize outlying events into more palatable trends. Boy can I get carried away!

I'm going to detour from the adoption theme for a minute so bear with me.

Aren't words fun. I don't consider myself scholarly in any way, but I do love finding the right word. Having worked with many different organizations and taught in various capacities, I am routinely dismayed by the decline of language.

Just as supermarkets and big box stores have reduced every possible category to the same two or three offerings throughout the world, mass media and communication have allowed us to reduce the number of verbs, modifiers, and the like to a seemingly inadequate arsenal. The benefit is that these words are universally recognized; the danger is that they are typically the linguistic equivalent to Iceberg lettuce.

Selective word choice isn't about elitism, it's about accuracy, about flavor. We can learn to get by on the same old things day after day, but through making an effort to enjoy the distinctive flavors of the world, appreciating the regional differences, and defining your personal tastes we can both define our individualism and strengthen our interconnectedness.

The food metaphor was simply for demonstration purposes for as some of you know, where food is concerned, I am among those who appear quite content to eat the same things everyday. Hey, we are all students in one realm or another. Live, love, learn - repeat as necessary.

This blog has been a great outlet for me. Contrary to what Mrs. Leggett (my high school English teacher) might have experienced, I love writing, and this blog has given me a place to do it. I look forward to the near future when I will have many more things to say and share about the process of adoption and becoming a parent.

I truly appreciate that, for whatever reason, you have chosen to follow our journey. I hope that you find it insightful, informative or at least enjoyable. Please know that we are honored that you take this time with us, and though we will never know that some of you are even out there, the comments left from friends and people new to us have been reaffirming. Take Care.

Well the day has finally come when I can confidently say we are going back. We received our official paperwork necessary to apply for our travel visas yesterday. We made travel arrangements yesterday and will be flying Boston - Amsterdam - Almaty - Astana departing on the evening of Saturday 27 Oct, and arriving in the early afternoon of Monday 29 Oct. If all goes smoothly, we may return to the States just before Christmas, though the odds of returning sometime between Christmas and New Years seems more likely.

Though I recognize that there will be lots to do before we head off, the fact that we have done this once before certainly takes a lot of stress out of the process. Once again KJ's parents will be coming out to stay with the boys while we are gone and we can in no way express how much that means to us.

In some ways packing this time around will be simpler and in other ways it will be more difficult. Experience allows us to know more precisely what things are needed, though time of year certainly dictates a new, bulky, heavy set of items. I haven't seen signs of snow yet in the Astana weather, though I have seen nightly lows in the 20's with some frequency.

We do know that we will not have the same apartment we stayed in previously, but do expect something similar in the same area of town. We have also requested that our agency inform our in-country coordinator that we would like to have a DSL connection installed in our apartment before we get there so that we are able to maintain an easy internet connection during our time in country. We did not have this in July, but are regularly seeing blogs of families in Astana talk of having a DSL connection, and thought that we would be as proactive as we could be about getting that set up. Time will tell, but what a difference that would make.

So now we begin to prepare in earnest. The books are being selected, music downloaded, dvd's gathered, gifts assembled, passports readied, clothes chosen, and perhaps most importantly, the brand new money ordered. Three weeks from tomorrow all the prep work will be behind us and we will once again lift off the tarmac at Logan Airport marveling at the incomprehensible ways our lives will have been forever changed before we again touch down in Boston.

I expect to be apprehensive about creating too great a set of expectations, but will certainly not be pessimistic or cynical because of our July experience. As I have said before, these events are all part of the journey that will eventually lead to our becoming a family, and in that journey there is no right way or wrong way, no mistakes, and certainly no regret. As every family accepts, there may be setbacks and challenges, but in the greater world view, ours have certainly been trivial to this point. Are there more ahead - without a doubt. Take Care.