Welcome friends, family, and facebook...

Now that we are officially registered in a region of Russia, we are announcing to everyone about our adoption. Welcome! We started this long journey back in April of this year so you may want to go back to the beginning and read backwards on the blog. I think you can also subscribe to the blog and it will let you know when we update it with any info we get. I should warn you though, neither one of us is a writer so our posts are few and far between especially since we are now in the waiting phase. It probably won't get very interesting until mid-2012. So for now, please just put us in your prayers, for our patience during the wait, for our preparations, but more importantly please pray specifically for our future child. The circumstances that this baby will be coming from are no doubt undesirable. Please pray that his/her physical/emotional needs are taken care of. Pray for the parents and family of this child and whatever circumstances bring that family to the situation they are in.

As a recap of what we may or may not have mentioned in previous posts:
We are adopting a baby from Russia between the ages of 0-18 months, most likely will be above 10 months old because they are not "released" for international adoption until that point. They want to give family and other Russian families the opportunity to adopt the child first. We have requested either gender, although boys are more common.
We have already completed the heavy paperwork portion of the process and are now in the probably 6-12 month waiting period. At that point, we will expect to receive a referral for a child that has been matched with our family. Once we get a referral, we will have less than a couple weeks before we take the first trip to Russia to meet our baby. That first trip will be about 10 days long. After that, we will come home and wait to hear about our court date. A second trip will be scheduled around that court date and will be about 3-4 weeks long. The court date is towards the beginning of that time and once the judge says "da" to us, we will still have a 10 day waiting period before we can then take our child to Moscow to do even more paperwork. Then we fly back to the US with our baby who will become a US citizen upon arrival in the US! And then the real fun begins!...