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.

It's a Boy!!!

So we have decided to go to Kazakhstan for a brother for Alex! He is just going to love that! He can teach his bro how to make quad noises and cow noises at the top of his lungs!!!

We have decided to name him Anthony Graham. We really like both of those names... And no we are not trying to name our kids with all the same letter of the alphabet, it just so happens that we like that one! ha!

Kazakhstan Again!!!!!!!

We are going to Kazakhstan again!!! China is planning on taking about 3 years to give out referrals for our LID group, so we decided that we have time to go to Kaz! Kazakhstan should take about a year to complete an adoption there. So we are in "Super Fast Paperchase Mode" if there is such a thing! Our goal is to be able to hand deliver it to our agency the second weekend in October, since we plan on being in the area!! So we are hoping to be able to travel late next spring or early summer 2008!!! Alex needs a sibling! For now we have no preference on a boy or girl, so we will see who God has chosen for us!





We spent a few hours with our friends a while ago that were in Kaz with us last time. Their little guy is about 3 months younger than Alex and they had such a fun time chasing each other around the kitchen and playing, that we just could't wait 2 more years!