No Major News.

March 24,2008
Well… here we are private and all! Now what?

I have nothing to report, really. We are currently waiting for our referral.

Someday soon we will receive a referral, which in Kazakhstan is an unofficial match with a child. We should receive a picture and medical information on him. When we accept our referral, the attorney’s office will forward our Dossier on to the region where the baby is. After that we will receive a “Letter of Invitation”. That will give us the date that we need to be in Kazakhstan. Then we will go.

I would like to talk about the reasons we decided to go private. The most important reason it to protect our adoption process.

Because a “referral” in Kazakhstan is not given by the government like China, it is unofficial, until the day the judge says the adoption is final, our baby is not “ours”, meaning that a birthparent or other birth family member can come and if they even visit our baby, he will be unavailable for adoption to us. Some agencies choose to not give referrals to their clients and some people actually prefer to go to Kazakhstan themselves to pick out their child. Therefore it is possible for another Pre-Adoptive Parent to adopt our child before we get there, if they know to ask for a certain child. So when we receive a referral we will not be sharing where he is, how old he is, or his given birth name. Once we are in Kazakhstan we will be posting some of this information, but not until then. I hope this makes sense to you all. If not… just move on and read the other stuff!

When we get home from Kazakhstan, we will make the blog public again, so anyone can read about our amazing experiences! We enjoy sharing this with anyone. Adopting a child is by far the most unbelievably wonderful thing we have ever done. We hope that our blog can give someone else the confidence they need to want to do this themselves. There are still 143 million orphans in the world and growing every day.