So, You Want to Adopt a Little Kid?

Recently, Ukraine released new information regarding the 2008 quota for foreign adoptions. If you will recall, back in Dec. 2007, they issued the infamous Decree #4939, which limited all foreign adoptions to 1,453 dossiers, or families. The exact number of children this represents is unknown, but probably close to that number. By March of this year, the backlog of dossiers to submit by foreigners reached this limit, and no amount of pleading by those that didn't make it in would make them budge. That's why we got stuck all year. Now, as the end of 2008 nears, they have tallied up the number of dossiers they have processed so far, and have observed that they will actually end up under the quota. Therefore, they are allowing more dossiers to be submitted at this time. The exact number they will allow is unclear, but estimates range from 200-400. It is clear, however, that they will cease accepting dossiers on Nov. 27, regardless of whether the quota is reached. Also, if the quota is reached prior to Nov. 27, all submissions will cease.

The Ukrainian government also provided statistics of how many children are available for adoption to foreigners. You must realize that not all children in orphanages are available for adoptions. In fact, I have seen estimates that only 10% are available for adoption. There are several reasons for this. First of all, Ukrainians get first dibs on the children. When a child enters an orphanage, for the first 14 months they are available to Ukrainians only. Healthy babies are the most likely to be adopted by Ukrainians. Second, many, many children are in the orphanages for economic reasons, and still have family that loves them and visits them. Third, the Ukrainian government is having some success with their foster care system recently, especially for the younger children. Fourth, siblings will rarely be adopted separately. If an older sibling refuses to be adopted, or no one has any interest in him or her, then the younger ones will very likely not be adoptable. So, just keep this is mind when you see orphanage pictures with all those cute little kiddies.

The new official statistics presented the data broken down by age and health. There are 4 age groups, and healthy or unhealthy. The original document can be found on this US Embassy page. I have made a graph so that you can see the data visually.



The first thing you will notice is that there are about 25x more older children available than younger ones. Second, they claim that there are no children under 3 yo available for foreign adoption without "serious health problems". I have often been amazed at the blogs of people who went over there and then were told that there were NO healthy children. See for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

If you are going into your SDA appt. blind, looking for a very young child, then you can see for yourself the chances of getting a healthy child, if that is your desire. It's not impossible, just difficult. You must be prepared emotionally before you go, and both spouses need to be on the same page regarding what kinds of health problems are manageable.

Submitted!

I am happy to report that Oleg submitted our dossier today. We received the email ½ hr. ago. Oleg thinks we will have an SDA appointment in December.

We did have a false alarm, though. Oleg sent us an email at 11:13 AM Kiev time to tell us that he was not able to submit our dossier because of a new requirement for the Letter of Obligation. Those of you working on your dossier, or waiting to submit be warned: You should contact your facilitator immediately to find out the new document you need and get it over there.

We do have concerns about a Dec. appointment, though. Around the middle of Dec. through early Jan., the Ukrainian government kind of shuts down for the holiday season. That could cause huge delays if we're in-country when that happens. It wouldn't be so bad before we have possession of the kids. We could just come home and go back in Jan. But what if the kids are ours and the whole country shuts down and we're unable to get the paperwork we need to bring them home? I'm not going to worry about that right now.

UPDATE: I had emailed Oleg right away to ask him if we'll be getting a letter from the SDA to inform us of our appointment or if he'll be telling us when it is. He said it would be him. "Be ready for December."

It'll Never Be the Same

I scheduled this entry to post to the blog at 9:00 AM Kiev time.

9:00 on Thursday.

The day that Oleg said he would be submitting our dossier.

Today is our day.

Some time from 9-11.

Can it actually be happening? Will he truly submit it today? These documents we worked on since July of 2007? When the lawyers at the SDA peruse it, will they find it acceptable?

And what if they do?

Do we find out our appointment soon? Do we have to be there soon? Are we ready? I mean REALLY ready?

Up until today, we could have told Oleg no. Don't do it. But now... there's no turning back.

This could be the day where 5 people will look back and say... That was the day that changed our lives forever.

Status

Latest tidbits of info from Oleg today.

• 150-200 dossiers will be accepted.


• Submission hours at SDA are from 9-11 AM, Mon-Thu.
  Mon: Kids under 6 y.o.
  Tue: Kids 6-8 y.o.
  Wed: Kids 8-12 y.o.
  Thu: Kids 13 y.o. and over


• 15-20 dossiers per day accepted.


• One dossier per person accepted.


• Facilitator teams can submit more than one dossier if the POA's specify more than one person.

The best news: Oleg will submit our dossier next Thu. Yay!

Certain Uncertaincy

Well, our 2nd dossier is in Ukraine, translated, and now, apparently, gathering dust again.

Information out of there always seems to be conflicting. Here's my latest dialog with Oleg:

Q: [D]o you think you will be able to submit our dossier to the SDA on October 14?

A: Time will show[.] I know that SDA will accept dossier that not in line start from 16 October, but who know when will my line. I sign your dossier to this list.

Hmmm... not too sure what to make of it.

Delivered!

Just got an email from Oleg. He got the dossier at 1:00 PM local time and has already given it to his translator. Thanks for all who prayed for it. Now my palms are getting sweaty as I consider what could this mean for us? Last week at church during prayer time we asked the congregation to pray for a successful submission, but not too successful if you know what I mean. We would like more than 1 week's notice that we have to be there. I'm freaking out!

Exception!

Yep, our dossier hasn't been delivered yet. It is sitting in a status called Exception. I asked Oleg what that means and he didn't know either. Overnight delivery to Ukraine really means within a month.

Last night I emailed scans of our dossier to him so he can start on whatever translating is needed. The dossier was translated last March and not much has changed in it except for dates and notaries' names, so I wouldn't think translating is too big of a deal.

Valya

If you've been following our blog, you may know that we've been trying to reach Valya directly. Last June we made arrangements for someone to visit Valya and to let her know that we want to adopt her. To make a long story short, this person was not able to meet directly with her, but rather with some ladies from the orphanage. The meeting went well, but we never got any answer back to the question. The reason he was not able to meet with her was because we don't have an appointment yet.

Now that we believe we are getting closer to an appointment, we are making new arrangements for someone to go see her.

If you will, pray that the orphanage director will allow it this time and that God's will be done regarding her joining our family. And also that we would get an appointment soon. As I type this, our dossier is in Kiev but has not been delivered to Oleg yet. Pray that it does not get held up in a delivery exception. That happened last time. It took over a week to be delivered. Thanks.

Around the World in 80 Days

Well I hope it's not 80 days.

Actually, I UPS'd our dossier 1½ days ago and at this moment it is in Warsaw, Poland. Poland is one of Ukraine's next-door neighbors to the west, so hopefully it doesn't take long to get to Kiev and then delivery. Unless... there is the dreaded Exception.

Dossier Is Complete Again

For the first time since March, we have a complete and up-to-date dossier again. Will send it to Kiev tomorrow. Here I am holding the 20 apostilled documents. Next week I'll list out what they are.

It's Always Something

You know, just once I would like something to go smoothly with our dossier. I got a call from the Secretary of State's office this morning to tell me that one of the documents in our dossier can't be certified. Apparently, the lady that notarized it used a rubber stamp but she is only registered for embossing. Great. I'm heading down to the bank now to redo that one again and send it off today. That means that I will not be able to send the dossier to Kiev until Monday, instead of tomorrow. Grrr. Big GRRRRR.

UPDATE: I was able to get the corrected document sent off today. So far, we are on-track for Monday.

The Beginning of the End of the Beginning

Today, we FINALLY got our updated homestudy in the mail. It was the last document we needed for our updated dossier. I got home from work, scanned the new documents in, triple-checked everything, then dropped the packet into the mailbox in time for it to go out today. It is off to our Secretary of State's office for apostilles. They have a same-day processing policy, which means that we should have it back on Friday, and I'll send it out to Oleg on the same day. It should be in Kiev early next week. And then? We shall see.

Anxiously Waiting for HS

Got another email from Oleg today. He wants the dossier ASAP. Says he thinks he can get it turned in as soon as he gets it. All we are waiting for is the updated homestudy. I better press our social worker...

UPDATE: I just talked to our social worker by phone. She is out of town and will not be able to get to it until next week. Grrrr...

It's the Time of Year When...

...a grasshopper's thoughts turn to love! I was out walking Sparkle today and these grasshoppers on "dates" were all over the place. I guess I find nature interesting. Proverbs 25:2 says "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter." I suppose this can mean alot of different things, one of which is it's OK and honorable to be a scientist. And I guess that makes me a king today. But I digress.

It's also the time to... send our dossier over to Kiev again. That is - IF WE CAN EVER FINISH GETTING IT UPDATED. This has been like a slow motion wheel that just keeps on turning and never stops.

I mentioned in that LifeLight post that I had news to share with you from our facilitator. On August 3 we had gotten an email from him that we should update our dossier. You may recall that we had let most of our dossier expire, as there hadn't seemed to be any reason to keep it fresh due to having no chance of getting it submitted this year. So when he sent us an email to get it updated, I set to work on it.

Unfortunately, you can't just do it overnight. For example, this was the time that Sergey was with us and we were gone alot. When I called the clinic to get another physical it was 3 weeks before I could get in. Then of course, the lab work took another 2 weeks or so to come back. Then there was a comedy of errors getting the medical reports put together correctly (like last time). We just got the completed ones yesterday.

The news I wanted to share was that Oleg told us that the SDA wants 8-9 months of life on the dossier when it gets submitted. Yikes! This means that the papers need to be updated every 3-4 months. That is terribly inconvenient.

Anyway, I was thinking we could send our dossier out for apostilles, but we had our home study and employment verification documents updated last June (but not sent over). Now with this new requirement they are already too old. I contacted our social worker to get us the third HS update. I hope to have that next week along with the employment forms. It is crazy.

On the positive side, Oleg has hopes that we can get submitted this year yet. From his email:

I have hope submit your dossier in October - November, SDA says that will accept dossiers in this time frame under general line, I think will come a lot facilitators for submit dossiers, and will be very difficult to submit, but I have hope.

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.

Lazy Boy

Man, I'm lazy updating our dossier. It just keeps getting more and more whacked. Ideally, we wouldn't see any red or yellow in the spreadsheet, but as you can see there is plenty of it. We actually do have some updated documents in hand, but I haven't sent them in for the apostilles or sent them over to Ukraine. From reading other blogs, it looks like there is time for that when we get a submit date, so we should get some warning. For now, I'm just gonna save the money. To date, since July of last year, we've spent $4,700 on these adoptions, and we have absolutely nothing to show for it yet. :-(

If you want the spreadsheet for yourself, you can get more info here and a link to download it. There have been 37 downloads so far.

Ditto on that Scanner Thing

In Michelle's blog post "Thank God for scanners", she mentions that she scans all of their dossier documents.

We did the same thing. It is the way to go. The first time you work on a dossier, you really have no idea what you are doing. Our facilitator, Oleg, has templates of the documents on his website. Those are indispensible, but after you get them filled out like you think they should be, you will invariably find that something is not filled out just right. What we did was scan the documents as we got them ready, BEFORE the apostilles, then emailed them over to Ukraine for review. Oleg and Dima looked them over and emailed us feedback for things to change. Most changes were little, but apparently very important. The medical forms were especially troublesome. They took several rounds of revisions until we got them right. I can't imagine actually mailing the documents back and forth to get them right. Ick. Once they gave us the thumbs-up, we sent them to the SD Secretary of State's office for apostilles, then UPS'd the originals over to Kiev.

As I blogged before, our documents in the dossier are expiring. We are slowly replacing them with updated versions. I'm kind of dragging my feet on getting them sent over, though, since there is cost involved and it seems needless at this time. There is very little hope of getting our dossier submitted this year, even though we are wanting to adopt older kids.

Slippery Slope

Oh how fun, our dossier is beginning to expire.

Ukraine considers the documents in our dossier good for one year. When it gets submitted to the SDA by our facilitator, they must have at least 6 months of lifetime on them. Therefore, allowing for mailing to Ukraine, EVERY document will be required to be refreshed about every 5 to 5½ months.

We are just reaching our first deadline. Our homestudy will expire on June 14. I emailed our social worker today to get an updated one.

Since we started this blog after the original dossier was sent over, I never had a chance to blog about our original dossier. I'll do that now as we go on so you can see what documents there are in it.

PS: If you're also in our situation, I have a spreadsheet to help you track your dossier dates here. There have been 30 downloads to date.

DossierDates Spreadsheet v1.2

After a conversation with our facilitator, I was able to clarify how the lifetime of the dossier's Power of Attorney document works. As far as I know, this is the only document whose expiration date depends on what you and your facilitator agree on. For example, we specified in our PoA that it was good for 2 years. You may have chosen 1 or 3 years in yours.

I made an update to the DossierDates spreadsheet to include this document, and it also indicates that you should put in your own PoA lifetime.

I also decided to pull out the FBI Fingerprinting documents from the main section, because, while they are important, they are not actually part of the dossier.

I should have emphasized before that this spreadsheet is specific to the United States, due to some of the documents it refers to. If you are from another country, such as Canada or Italy, and wish to see this modified for your country's requirements, please contact me.

You can find the updated version 1.2 files here.

DossierDates Spreadsheet v1.1

Well, I already have an update to the spreadsheet I posted earlier today. It is now at version 1.1. The big thing that I should have had, but didn't, was the FBI Fingerprinting broken out between husband and wife. I also made a few cosmetic changes, including titling, document properties, coloring, version, and contact info. Follow the link in this post to get the updated spreadsheet. Hopefully that is the last update for awhile.

If you downloaded the original one (I note that there were already 15 downloads today), I recommend that you grab this one. There's enough changes that it would be worth your while.

UPDATE: There is a newer follow-up post here.