Where in the world is Chuvashia, Russia?

Okay, so it's not as catchy as "Carmen San Diego", but it is the region that we have been assigned to. One of the steps in getting matched to a child is getting assigned to a specific region. We just found out today that Chuvashia is the region we have been assigned to. The agency sent us a fact sheet about the region that gave us a summary of its history, people, economy, and politics.

As you can imagine, we are going to be doing a lot of research about the area in the coming days. We do know that the capital city of Chuvashia is Cheboksary, which is about 400 miles southeast of Moscow. If you'd like to do your own digging, here is the link on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuvashia

Another interesting happening this week was that Brandon heard from some friends of hers who are adopting a child domestically. They were matched to a birth mother and were waiting on the birth of their child when the mother skipped town. Their agency thinks that the birthmom was shopping for a better offer outside of Texas. Apparently, Texas is pretty strict about the "benefits" that a mother can receive. They were devastated, but are pushing onward. They have to be matched all over again to a birthmom.

This is one of the reasons why we chose to adopt internationally vs. domestic. The rights in the case of a domestic adoption are very heavily weighted to the birth parents, plus there is the surprise factor that can happen on occasion (like the one above).

Domestic and International adoptions offer different experiences, challenges, and rewards. We feel we made the right decision for us because the issues with domestic adoption seemed unbearable. That doesn't mean that it's not right for other families, or that international adoption is in some way better. It's a very personal decision as to which one is right for your family.

We're On The List!!!

We officially are on the adoption waiting list for Russia! It's been a long time coming, and we've had a series of issues that have tried our patience, but we are over another big hurdle. We've been told that the wait will be about 12-15 months for a girl, so we will need as much of your prayers as possible to help our patience last just a little while longer.

So here are a couple things to note at this point:

1) If our daughter is somewhere between 9-12 months old when we meet her, then that means she could be born in the next few weeks. If she is closer to 15-18 months, then she is probably already out there. But we won't know what day she is actually born until next year. Funny to think that on the day she was/will be born will be just another day of waiting for us and not knowing. We have all faith that God will look out for her even though we haven't met her yet and we will not yet know the day she arrives in this world.

2) We just took a trip to Vegas, and we found out the day before that we were on the list. So it really started to hit us that soon our lives will be completely different. It's funny what we noticed with this new knowlege. For instance, I never really paid attention to the fact that they have baby changing shelves in the bathroom of an airplane. I never needed to know that before, but considering that trip was probably one of the last times that we will travel by ourselves, it really started to sink in.

Thanks to everyone for your continued support, interest, and prayers.

If you build it, he will come

By the way, I am watching Field of Dreams. Quite possibly one of the greatest baseball movies made in my lifetime (behind The Natural, of course). Every time I watch it, I think of my father and how much I miss him. He loved both of these movies, and he loved baseball.

I can't wait to teach my little girl about baseball like Ray Kinsella (played by Kevin Costner) does in the movie, and like my Dad taught me. Oh, have we mentioned that we are asking for a little girl? That's probably a useful piece of information to share at this point.

There's no L in Brandon

We finally received our Criminal Background checks from the Texas Dept of Public Safety. I can't tell you how excited I was when I got back to the office after lunch and saw the FedEx envelope on my desk. I knew exactly what it was when I walked in my office because I never get mail at the office.

I opened up the envelope and was very happy to see that they included not just the two copies for each of us that we needed, but four. Wow, what a nice surprise, right? I looked again at the forms more closely only to find that they misspelled Brandon's name (they put an L instead of an R, so it said Blandon).

I guess I can see how they made the mistake. I only put in 3 ways for them to cross check the spelling: (1) we typed our names on the letter we sent to them, (2) we had to include our driver's license numbers, and (3) we had to include our social security numbers. And before you ask, her name is spelled correctly on both her driver's license and socials security card.

The good news is that our agency said that it should be okay for the first time around. The bad news is that I found out that we have to go through this all over again between our two trips to Russia. Boy, are we excited!!!

Up next: getting our FBI fingerprints done and getting the last round of our Hepatitis shots. Oh the joy!

Homeland Security finally got something right

We received our form today that allows us to get our fingerprints done for our FBI background check! And before you ask, the answer is yes - this is a 2nd and completely different background check than the one the Texas DPS is conducting.

You may remember the problems we had with USCIS several months ago. Well, our homestudy was mailed to the Dallas office of USCIS in January, but our original application was sitting in the pending homestudy file in the Tulsa office. We e-mailed the Dallas office back on Feb 13th asking them to track down our application from the Tulsa office.

A week went by, and we heard nothing, so I e-mailed the Tulsa office asking them to track down our homestudy. Thankfully, they e-mailed me back the same day and said they would get the homestudy forwarded to them so that they could process it. At the same time, they also said they would mail us our fingerprint instruction form. We weren't holding our breath waiting for it, so it was to our complete surprise we received it today (only 3 business days after we heard from them). I am surprised I didn't pass out when Brandon called me at work to tell me that we had received it.

So now we have 90 days to go get our fingerprints taken so that they can complete a separate background check (because obviously one isn't good enough - yeah, right).

And in case you were wondering, the Dallas office e-mailed me back 2 days after the Tulsa office responded to me to let me know that Tulsa would be doing the processing. Gee, thanks for the "news"!

Government Conspiracy

Brandon and I had to send in finger prints to the Texas Dept of Public Safety for them to do a background check on us. We mailed the cards to them on Jan 2nd. We were told that it takes them 2-3 weeks to process. So on week 4, I decided to call them to see what was going on. They informed me that they didn't have us in the system yet which meant 1 of 2 things:
(1) they had not received them back from the dept that does the actual check yet, or
(2) they had received them but they had not yet been put into the system.
So they told me to call back the following week.

That was 2 weeks ago, so I called again this past Friday. The lady looked our names up and said that they had sent everything back to us because payment was not included. Well I did include the $32 payment in the form of a money order, which I guess they lost. So in order to track the money order down, I have to pay $15 and that takes a month to process. So rather than wait, I sent the forms back yesterday with a personal check this time (easier to track, even though the first time I was told a money order was preferred).

Since this is the 2nd government agency that has basically messed up our paperwork, you can only imagine how livid I was at this point. So livid, in fact, that on Saturday when we got the documents back from them in the mail, I wrote both Texas Senators and our US Congressman to tell them how messed up the process is. Doubt it does any good, but it made me feel better at the time.

After mailing the package back to them via FedEx last night, I met Brandon at our favorite Chinese restaurant. We talked a little more about the phone conversations that I had with DPS trying to track down our money order and that led to a discussion on the incompetence of government agencies, which got our blood boiling a little more. At the end of dinner, Brandon opens her fortune cookie to find not 1, but 3 fortunes in it. 2 of them read as follows:

"Don't give up. Your problem gets better next month."

"A short stranger will soon enter your life with blessing to share."

I'm not saying we believe in fortune cookies, but it is kind of ironic that we got those on a day like that. The good news is that it had us laughing and our respective blood pressures went back to normal.

One Approval Down, One More To Go!

We received word that we were officially approved by our adoption agency as an adoptive family! This is the first big milestone that we've been working towards. We still have a long way to go, but we know at least feel like we've gotten somewhere.

The next steps are as follows:

1) We are still waiting to receive our criminal background check from the Texas Dept of Public Safety. We hope to have that in the first week or two of February as that is part of our dossier that has to go to Russia. (FYI - a dossier is all the important documents that Russia needs in order to approve us)

2) We just got a packet of documents that our dossier service sent back to us to have signed and notarized. So glad that we hired Kate to help us with our dossier because that's one less thing we have to worry about getting right. She basically checks our work and organizes everything. Well worth every penny to have a few less headaches in a process that is chocked full of them.

3) Send our dossier to the state of Texas for a process called apostille. From what I understand, they just go through our documents to make sure that all the notarys we used are valid.

4) Once the dossier is back from the state, we send it to Russia for their approval. Once we are approved by them, it's supposedly about a 9-18 month wait.

Thanks to everyone who is keeping tabs on us. Please keep the thoughts, prayers and well wished coming because we sure need them.

Oh, almost forgot - we still need to go get our 3rd shot in the series of TB2 shots, plus a couple others (like one for menongitis, I think). Yeah for us!!!