Ukraine Adoption

We have our appointment!

Yes, it's true. We have received our invitation letter from the NAC; it took three weeks to arrive in regular snail mail. Our appointment is Wednesday, Feb. 2. We can't believe we have a little more than 2 weeks to get everything ready. We have to update some documents that expired in January, get them notarized and then apostilled. We need plane tickets and visas. We will probably leave on Jan. 31.

A little background and some reasons why there is a big gap in our blog entry dates here...

We submitted our translated dossier of 19 official international documents to the NAC on May 27. Whew!

They decided right about that time that they were not scheduling appointments until 2005. So there goes one of the reasons we chose Ukraine (speedy?) We received a letter telling us this in August and asking us for a requested date in 2005. We received another letter in November telling us they weren't confirming any dates yet and would send a note to us in December. That note arrived Jan. 13, with the Feb. 2 date.

So we have a wild 2 weeks ahead of us and we really appreciate all of the support we are getting from family and friends.

We have an awesome facilitator/translator in Ukraine who has been helping us for more than a year.

I will try to update this blog as often as I can. We will have our laptop with us in Ukraine and we're told that there are Internet cafes in the big cities, and we can use a phone line (with pre-paid phone cards) in the small towns. We'll also be taking our camera so hopefully we'll be able to show pictures of this journey! Strap on your seat belts and stay tuned!

--Laura