WAITING!!!!!

The waiting has been very hard! As of this posting, we have been waiting over a year since our dossier was submitted. We've tried to keep busy and do little things in preparation of our daughter's arrival.

In February 2007, during my mid-winter break from school, I painted the bedroom that will be the nursery. It is a beautiful bluish-greenish color that is officially called Forest Glen. (Sorry, couldn't do the traditional "pretty pink" for a girl's room). Forest Glen is a very calming color that I loved the moment that I started painting it on the walls. We decided to make the room at least a little more girlie by decorating it with white bunnies. As of this date, she has almost 40 bunnies! Greg thinks this is probably enough, but I keep finding them on sale. And, you know, I can't pass up a good sale!

My mom gave us my rocking chair from when I was a little girl. My friend, Jacqueline, is using her artistic talents to paint it for us. All we gave her was color ideas. She's taking it from there. We can't wait to see it. We'll post a picture when it's done.

Since we started with CHI, we knew that a reaccreditation process had begun for all adoption agencies working with Russia. It seemed that every month, we heard that it should be happening any day now. Luckily, even without being fully accredited (temporary), adoptions were still happening. In fact, in April, we received information from CHI that Astrakhan was one of the few regions that were moving along well. At this point, we were third in line for a girl, up-to-and-including 18 months old. We continued to be optimistic that our wait wouldn't be too long.

Summer came and went with no news!

In December of 2007, we got some good news! CHI was fully accredited for Russian adoptions! We were so happy. This certainly brought hope from all that things would start speeding up.

Soon after the accreditation came through, we found out that our documents were all expiring. (Most are only good for one year). We started gathering all of our documents again.

On January 26, 2008, we found out that not only were our documents expiring, but we were no longer registered in Astrakhan because of this. That meant that other families could move ahead of us in line since our original dossier basically was lifeless! We were not on the list to receive a referral for a child!

Well, that was all I needed to hear! We contacted HATW to update our home study. Another huge thank you to HATW for everything!!! Our home study was the big thing to update, but we also had other documents in order to get us registered. We gathered all of those. On February 7, we sent our updated home study brief and all of the other registration documents to CHI. Yeah, everything was back on track. We were back on the list for a referral!

We had some other documents to be updated, but they didn't need as big of a rush as the registration documents. We gathered some documents and sent a package to CHI on March 3, 2008.

On March 21, we had to go back to the USCIS office in Detroit to be re-fingerprinted. (Because apparently your fingerprints can change over the course of 15 months). I was on spring break for the whole next week, so I spent it getting the remaining documents ready. Those were sent to CHI on March 28. We're just waiting for the results of our fingerprinting and then everything should be updated!

Well, we think we're all caught up on what has been happening during our long wait! Now that we have this blog up and running, we will try to keep it updated!