All posts by Molly

First Adoption

SDA Appointment

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We had our SDA appointment. It was nothing like I expected… much more relaxed than I expected. The first thing that the girl asked me was how old I was, when I told her, she laughed and said that she was the same age and couldn’t imagine having children. But, she was just curious!

Everything with Reed is as expected. He has no siblings and was born to a single mother.

Scarlett’s referral was a bit bumpier. She has two siblings. But, the lady doing our referral pulled it up on the computer and one was adopted by an American family and the second is in Ukrainian foster care. So, neither are available for adoption (this is a good thing for us!). We also found our that her special need is more severe than we thought. We are still trying to process what that means and doing research to understand it. If you happen to know what that special need is, please don’t post about it in the comments. You can email me if you want to talk to us about it or have something to share.

Please pray for Scarlett and us as we process this.

We will be traveling to their region tomorrow night and hope to meet them Wednesday or Thursday.

First Adoption

More news on the vote

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We received news that the adoption vote is on the list to be read the week of December 14th. We will probably have court around the 6th of December, and then our 10 day wait will begin. Once that 10 day wait is over, we will be safe and able to take our kids home, no matter what the vote is. If you do the math, depending on when our court date is, the vote will fall right around the end of our 10 day wait. There is also a chance that the 10 day wait could be waived (and we’d be home earlier!).

We want a favorable vote for the orphans in Ukraine. We want Ukraine to continue adoptions, especially special needs and older children adoptions, while they work on a bilateral agreement or ideally, to become a Hague country. We want the families after us to be able to bring their kids home, and of course, we want to bring Reed and Scarlett home.

I am going to see what else I can find out about the immigration card for those of you just a few days or weeks behind us. Other families have completed their adoptions without it, in the past few weeks, but I will ask our facilitator today.

First Adoption

The Immigration Card

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I had my first worried moment of our trip. I was trying to stay awake while Aaron was napping, so I decided to flip through the Ukraine Handbook from RR. I saw the page about the “Immigration Card” that we needed to fill out at the airport today. And it says how you must hold on to it and give it to them when you leave. Um, we never saw this card. But in the RR handbook and my google search, it sounded important!

I posted about it on the RR yahoo group about it and fortunately, Meredith Cornish got back to me. In September she had to fill one out, but this trip, they told her that she did not. And told her husband, who traveled separately, the same thing.

If you don’t know who Meredith is, you should! She used to be the director of the Ukraine program for RR, but she just recently stepped down from her position with RR, as their in the process of adopting their 7th and 8th children from Ukraine right now.  They have a very interesting story about their daughter Aleksa who they’re in the process of adopting. Go read her blog.

I think we might meet up with them tomorrow. It will be nice to see other Americans! It has been a little bit hard since we got to Frankfurt… we never know what language someone speaks. I’ve already had a few odd language encounters– in German and Russian. And another guy who asked me where I was from, and when I said Kansas, he said “Missouri?”, “Kansas”, “Missouri?” And, we were done.