Packing...

While we do not have travel dates or referral yet... a couple months ago we started our "travel packing room." Our guest room was filled with the suitcases and anything we "thought" we would be taking with us! It's been a mess! Well... sort of... each person in the family got a corner of the bed, and we would each put our stuff in that area. We had our books and lists in there ready to get going at any time! Well... little did we know we would still be here this weekend! But our friends Anthony and Lianro are coming to visit! We are very excited! But we had to clean out the room! If only actually packing to leave was as easy! We threw everything in suitcases and stacked them in the closet! Ta-da! Clean! I am sure we will not leave our house so clean when we leave for Kaz!

Here is a peak at the stuff we are planning to pack!

Here is the room after about 15 minutes!

LOI!

Oh my Goodness! So we have an LOI!!! We cannot believe it! It seems our final process is going a little backwards! Usually you get a referral and then you apply for the LOI, but us... noooooo, we get the LOI before we get a referral! Anyways who cares! We are just excited to know where we are going and that we should be going soon... in the next month or two... probably.

We have been keeping ourselves really busy around here with a new "business" that we started. It really did keep our minds off the wait a lot! We signed up to be a distributer for some very special Pre-Mixed Soil for raised been gardens! "We" is actually our already standing Corporation, J. L. Cook Construction. We were needing to find some more income for this year since our main customer is not building any gas stations this year... We have built a really nice website to sell our new product and of course have display beds here at our shop. We are hoping that this business takes off and can help pay for our upcoming adoptions! Our new Website can be found at http://www.weedfreegardenbed.com/ We are totally crazy about this stuff and can't wait until more of our friends and family can grow gardens in it! Anyways this has really helped pass the time lately. A friend called me today and mentioned that she checked my blog for an updat, but there was only the May Update on there... I had hardly noticed that May was gone! Its June!!!!!!

We have been eating lettuce and spinach out our garden for a couple weeks already. The other day we harvested our first radish, a Chinese Red Meat Radish. Well... that was one hot radish!!!!! oh my word! I am not sure what i am going to do with all the ones I have planted! Our potato plants are getting huge already! They are a foot tall at least! I have never grown potaoes before and the other day Bonnie and I dug some out of my Kitchen Garden to move to the Display garden (i planted too many, too close together) Well... there were already little tiny potaoes on there! They were hot pink in color, red potatoes!!! The were lovely and the most amazing vegetable i have ever grown in my garden! We were quite excited! It was very neat! In our new garden soil, we will be able to reach down under the plant and pull out a couple potatoes and let the plant keep producing! We are going to have a lot of potatoes!!! I was trying to find a place where I can get sweet potatoes to grow, since that is what babies seem to like most (I am guessing baby Anthony will be no different!), but I have not had any success on that one... I will keep looking.

We will definately share some of our produce on here as it ripens!

Time Line...

June 21,2007 – while discussing the wait for China… we said “why wait… why don’t we go to Kazakhstan again!?” Emailed Jim at WPA for some thoughts on this. Jim was out of the country, so Susan Cotten answered.
June 25 – Reply from Susan Cotten, that concurrent adoptions work all the time… We emailed back that we wanted a contract as soon as possible!
June 26 – Contacted Adoption Options about new homestudy. We can count the Post placement meeting in March toward the 2 HS visits. Sent in I600a application requesting approval for twins!!!
July 1 – Received our beautiful white binder with a contract from WPA. Signed our contract with WPA!!!
July 5 – Bank reference letter & Mortgage letter.
July 30 – Fingerprints for FBI approval.
August 27 – Post Placement Agreement
August 29 – Received Police clearance
September 4 – Birth certificates and Marriage Certificate
September 10 – Final medical forms
September 26 – Received Final Homestudy
October 9 – Sent the Homestudy for Kaz to UCIS, as well as the update for our extension on our China 171 approval.
October 13 – Met Susan Cotten and many other families at the WPA reunion in Atlanta. Learned that if you were requesting a boy, that we could send our Homestudy in early for translation.
October 19 – Faxed Homestudy to Temple at the office for early translation.
October 23 – Homestudy Agency License
October 24 – Received notice of our fingerprint appointments for USCIS! Finally!!!!!
October 26 – Employment letters
November 3 – Fingerprints for the USCIS.
November 24 – Received a letter from the USCIS office that they were confused, did we want to transfer approval from China to Kaz or do a separate approval for Kaz… if so I would have to pay… DUH!!! We paid way back in July!!! So annoyed! I even sent the 2 home studies separate with copies of all necessary documents with each one!
December 19 – New General Power of Attorney.
December 21 – Received I171-h!!!!!!!! Passport copies done.
December 26 – General Power of Attorney for both Jerry and I. Commitment letter.
December 27 – New Bank and Mortgage Letters. New Letter of Invitation, inviting ourto-be child to come live with us in the US. Apostilled, (while we were apostilling, we learned that the notary on our employment letter had not dated it, which was required… so we had to drive an hour and a half back to Kalamazoo to have another notary sign a new employment letter for us! Then drive an hour and a half back to the Office of the great seal and all before 4:30pm. It was 1 o’clock when we found out! We were speeding… :) copied and Fed-Exed everything to WPA. Our paperbaby was 4 pounds!
December 28 – Our paperbaby arrived at WPA at 12:29 pm. Happy 10th anniversary to us!!!! It should head off to Kaz yet today!
January 16, 2008 – New Homestudy Agency License to WPA.
January 28 – Dossier through translation and on its way to the Consulate in NY.
February 6-13? – Dossier left Consulate and went back to Kaz to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA)
April 11 – Signed Power of Attorney for the region we will travel to!!!!! Susan was asked about our requests for a baby…
June 4 – Found out we have an LOI already!!!! We do not know the terms yet though. WooHoo!!!! We can’t believe it! That means we may travel very fast when our referral comes!!!!

Waiting Still...

Well… here it is May. I am getting pretty sad over here waiting for a referral. When we turned in our dossier in December, I asked what they thought for a time line for our referral, after checking on some stuff they told me “any time from now until the next few weeks.” I freaked! I was so excited! We started getting ready! Then after referrals came through 3 weeks later they said it would be a little longer, maybe a couple more months. Well, it has been 4 months and no referral insight. Jerry is sure it will be a couple more months. My heart is aching something fierce! I am beside myself with anxiety to go!!!!! We even have our guest room set up as the packing room already! I have been gathering stuff for the trip for months! People ask me almost daily if I have heard anything or if we are leaving yet! Sadly, all I can do lately is shake my head no and walk away as soon as I can or they will start into the “you’d think they would want the kids to find homes faster,” or “why does it take so long?” The thing is, that this is still early in the game… most people have to wait much longer than this. (We have been waiting for our Kimi, from China now for 21 months!) But they said “weeks!” so my brain was ready, and I can’t seem to change it to the new plan! So it could easily be 2 more months. I am sad that we will miss Spring in Kazakhstan. That has been my dream to see Kazakhstan in the spring! Maybe we will have to go back again…

In case none of you know, we are approved for twins in Kazakhstan and twins in China. Either would be great and both would be AWESOME!!! I know, we are a little crazy… It has been a dream of mine to have twins in the family, we shall see!

Alex prays for Anthony daily, as well as our friends’ baby Dylan in Vietnam. Alex happily puts stuff that is too small in Anthony’s bed, that’s where we pile stuff until we decide to clear out his bed and put it away every month. He is so excited and ready for a sibling!

We have many more fears this time around. We have not even put Anthony’s name up on the wall like we did Alex and Kimi’s when we were getting ready for them. I am not sure what I am waiting for though. Although I suppose we could receive a referral for a girl, you never know! We have heard many stories lately of lost referrals and it makes me very nervous! Kazakhstan is getting very busy due to China being a 5 year wait and Guatemala shutting down as well as Vietnam now. I assume that is why our time line stretched… from weeks to months.

Anyways… that is how we are feeling around here! Praying everyday that we will soon know who “Anthony” is to be!

Kazakh Tulips!

When we were waiting for Alex two years ago we bought some tulips that originated in the Mountains of Kazakhstan so it has become a tradition to plant a few every year in honor of our children! This year i actually found a whole bunch andbought them and then lost them in the hub-bub of preparing for the Baja 1000. Well, as we cleaned out the garage after winter we found them!!! I felt so bad! so i threw a few in the ground right away and sent the rest home with Bonnie, who has more space this year... So several have come up and one is even blooming! I am so glad! i will take better care of them next year! The two species found in nature in Kaz are the Greigii and Kaufmann kinds. I don't remember which is which right now, but usually the Greigii has very pretty striped leaves, I think. I also included a couple pictures of other Kazakh tulips that i planted a couple years ago!

Something to think about...

April Already!!!

Personally I can not believe it is April of 2008 already! That is amazing.... Time goes by so fast, but at the same time the weeks seem to slowly drag by we wait for that special call!! It certainly helps having Alex around, as he is a constant source of laughter! Although I have to say that he doesn't make the wait any easier... if anything, the wait for Anthony is harder than it was for Alex... now we know what it all is like... to be a parent and love this little guy more than anything in the world... we want it again... NOW!

Hurry up baby Anthony!

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.

Planning to go Private with our Blog!

Sorry... y'all but we are going to take this blog private soon, for reasons I am sure most of you understand. This way, you will need to have a google account and have an invitation from me to view it. It is not too hard really. Just post a comment below (with your email address) that you would like an invite and i will put you on our list! I am not exactly sure when we will take it private but probably very soon. You can also email me at christel at jlcookconstruction dot com.

Dossier Finally Done!

It was one long paperchase! Goodness! It took 6 months to get the approval from Homeland Security. But we finally have it and our Dossier went to Kazakhstan on December 28th... our 10th anniversary. So now it needs to get translated and then it will head back to the US to the Consulate in New York! So now we wait again.