Adoption Update

Some of you may be wondering where we're at with the adoptions.

We received an email from our facilitator a few weeks ago saying that it is time to update our documents. We had let most of them expire since it is ridiculous to keep updating them for no reason. If you aren't aware, the majority of the documents in the Ukrainian dossier have a 1-year expiration date from the time they are dated. The kicker is that at the time the dossier is provided to the Ukrainian government, they require at least 6 months of lifetime remaining on every document. If you do the math, that means that almost every document needs to be replaced every 6 months until the time that the dossier is submitted.

So we started updating the documents again. Everything is complete now except for the health forms and the background checks. We went in last Saturday to the county jail for our 4th fingerprintings and sent the forms to the state office on Monday. I expect to get the forms back early next week.

Nancy needed a current physical before she had her wrist surgery so she got that part taken care of. I set an appt. for mine right after Oleg emailed us, but it was a couple of weeks before I could get in (which was a couple of weeks ago now). When I went in for the appt. I joked with my doctor that I was here for my monthly physical. hah. We also got our last hepatitis shots, so now our whole family is finished with those series of shots.

Nancy talked to our physician this morning and he said that the lab test results are back and he was preparing the reports. We should have the forms back shortly.

Once those are done, it's off to Pierre with the dossier for apostilles. The Secretary of State's office has a same day policy for apostilles. Once they get them, they will process them and send them back to us the same day.

Then it will take about 2 to 3 weeks for the "overnight" FedEx or UPS delivery to Kiev. The last time we sent it, we watched the shipment tracker closely. It went to Sioux Falls, Kentucky, Germany, Prague, and Kiev within a day but then sat in Kiev for a very long time. Maybe they were on vacation or something.

We've heard rumblings that they may accept a few new dossiers this Fall. We are certainly hoping for that.