Our adoption Journedy Thus Far

Welcome to our adoption blog. We thought this would be a good idea to start so friend and family can keep up with what is happening (or not happening) along our journey to bring our son home.



For those of you who don't know, we are not adopting from Ukraine anymore. Rather we are in the process of adopting from Bulgaria through Tree of Life (TOL). We started our journey in March by applying to Adoption Associates, Inc. (AAI) and then started our homestudy in April. We have most of our documents ready for our dossier but are still waiting on our I171 H from USCIS. Since we changed the country we are adopting from we had to send a letter to USCIS this past week to have them change that on our I600A. Another hiccup with changing countries at this point is that we are uncertain as to whether we have to fill out the I800 instead because Bulgaria is Hague certified. I emailed USCIS and they told me we are grandfathered in, so we do not have to fill out the I800.



You might be asking yourselves, why we are not adopting from Ukraine anymore? Well I have been reading other blogs of families who are were in Ukraine wanting to adopt toddler age children, and they were having 2 appointments with the SDA and coming home without a child. This was after being in the country for 5weeks. Well we just cannot afford to be in the Ukraine for that long financially and also we would miss our children back home. So, through God's providence I received an email from another adoption agency saying their Bulgaria program was open again because the USA and Bulgaria were Hague certified. So I looked into Bulgaria and talked with my husband about it and we felt that this would be the best place to adopt our son. With Bulgaria you receive a referral (like Russia) and medical info then you travel to visit your child ( you have to be in the country for 5 days) then return home for 12-16 weeks (while paperwork is being done to adopt your child) then you return again for another 5 days to get your child. That is a total of 10 days which is much doable. Also the children look a lot like me, olive, brown eyes and brown hair.



So that is the latest on our adoption. We are in the process of redoing our homestudy, which our social worker said should be done when we get back from vacation and then hopefully so will our I171h then we can ship everything off to Bulgaria. The wait is between 12-18 months for a boy age 2 yrs old is what we are being told. So please pray that everything will go smoothly so we can be in the waiting process for our referral. Will write when we have something to tell.