OUR DOSSIER HAS BEEN SUBMITTED!!!

It's hard to believe, but our dossier has finally been submitted! It was in our facilitator's hands since May 14, and he estimated it would be submitted sometime in July. He was actually right - it was submitted during "American hours" on Monday, July 30! Now the Department of Adoptions has 20 working days to go over our dossier and get back to us with either approval letter and a travel date, or rejection letter. Sometimes paperwork gets rejected by several reasons, but I really hope we will be approved. Lately the 20 working days are more like 30 working days, so I'm thinking we'll find out in about 6 weeks what our travel date will be. Usually it's approximately 3 months from the day of submission, so looks like it will be end of October - beginning of November.

A new picture

Here is Raisa on Deribasovskaya Street in Odessa:

Still no news

We are still waiting for the submission. I'm reading about the other families getting submitted, getting appointment dates, etc., so the process is working, we just need to wait a little bit longer. Per our facilitator, it should happen very soon. In this case we'll be traveling to Ukraine in the mid-October - mid-November.


In the meanwhile, here is a new picture of me and my firstborn:

Waiting for submission

Waiting, waiting, waiting. Our facilitator is hoping to submit our dossier in the early July - we are really hoping it will be the case! And our situation is not that bad. We know who we are going to adopt and sooner or later it will happen.

For some people it's not that easy. Since Ukraine adoption laws don't allow preselection, the families are usually presented with several profiles during their appointment in Kiev. But sometimes there are no healthy young children available on that day, so the families must make a decision - either accept a referral for the older child, or wait for another appointment. Currently, about 50 families are in Kiev waiting for 2nd or even 3rd appointments. Can you imagine how hard it is? One would ask: there are so many orphans in Ukraine, why they are not available for adoption? In order to be available for International adoption, the kids should be placed on the adoption registry: one month on the local level, one month on the regional level and one year on the national level. In theory, the children should be available in 14 months after they first were added to the local registry. But in the real life it's much more than that! For some unknown reason, it takes more than a month to transfer from one registry to another. I don't know why - it's just the Ukrainian way. So it's more like 16 - 17 months. Also, many children are lost in the system and are not registered at all! So while we are waiting for our appointment, we really hope the waiting families will find their kids and the waiting kids will find their parents soon.

Raisa on vacation

My friend Lena, who's Raya's legal guardian, took her to the Carpathian Mountains for a weeklong vacation. I'm so fortunate to have Lena - I don't know what we would do without her. Here are a couple of pictures from that place:

This is a lake next to the hotel:

This is a hotel where they are staying:

Adoption blogs

As a PAP (acronym for prospective adoptive parents) I spend a lot of time reading adoption blogs of people who already completed their adoption, are in Ukraine now or still in the paperwork stage. It helps me to find a lot of valuable information, get answers to many questions and prepare for our own upcoming trip to Ukraine. Some blogs are quite entertaining as their authors have natural writing talent, some just describe the facts, I love to read them all. But there is one blog, which just took my heart.

Jim and Dana Hale are in Odessa now adopting their two beautiful teenage daughters. Somehow they were able to capture the essense of Odessa and its people in their blog - not only it reads like a book, but it's also written from the bottom of their hearts. They talk about my hometown with such love, you would never guess they weren't born there :) Thank you very much from the native "odessit" for letting the world know about Odessa - The Pearl Of The Black Sea.

Waiting

Nothing new on the adoption front. I heard the SDA isn't accepting any new dossiers from Americans until July 2nd - they already met their quota for the second quarter. There is a number of dossiers for each country that can be submitted to SDA. It's 558 for USA in 2007, and 280 dossiers have already been submitted for American citizens.


I have a very cute picture to share. This is Victoria and Alex just before Victoria's dance recital:

No news

We are still waiting for our dossier to be submitted to the State Department of Adoptions. It's hard not knowing when we'll be going to Ukraine. In most cases people get an appointment date in about 3 months after dossier was submitted. For example, one family submitted on April 30th and found yesterday that their appointment is July 26th. However, another family submitted on February 19th, and also found out yesterday that their appointment is at the end of July. So we'll wait and see.