June 26, 2006.

It has been 6 months since I officially started my Kazakhstan adoption process, 8 months since I first started looking into adopting. In the beginning I have to say the process was a bit overwhelming and fustrating, but now it seems like it all just flew by.

The beginning was selecting an agency and country, finding an agency to do my homestudy. Starting the I-600A and all the other fun filled documents. Getting fingerprinted for this, fingerprinted for that. Waiting on this to come back then waiting to get that back. But again, all that paperwork is behind me know, so I hope...

I had a little trouble in the beginning finding an agency to do my homestudy. First one agency wouldn't do it because I wasn't using them for my adoption. They didn't want to take the chance because I was originally wanting to adopt from Russia, I have since changed to Kazahstan. Then another agency said they would do mine and sent me the packet to fill out. Then the lady said she didn't feel comfortable because I was a widow of only 6 months at the time. "They say you should wait a year to do anything" Who's they? and why should I wait to continue my life?

But I finally found a great agency and social worker to do my homestudy and had that done in about a month from start to finish. By that time my immigration approval was back and my packet was off to be apostilled. So I thought. I had papers apostilled in NJ, VA and one from TX and yup, they all had to go back to those states to be apostilled. Then with a some confussion with my birthcertificates, they had to go back seperately to be done, and sent again because they were returned because they basically went to the wrong floor of the building.

In the mean time of waiting for them, I sent the rest of my dossier to my adoption agency. My Agent, or what ever we want to call them, looked over my packet and made sure everything was good to go. She had told me that she would sent them out to be translated and would send the birthcertificates out when she got them. A couple days later I called and she still had not sent them out but said she would, she kind of sounded like she never said that. My birthcertificates finaly arrived and she said she would send my packet out to be translated. Well I didn't bother to ask why they weren't sent out the two times before.

Then she said we have a small issue, yeah always great to hear that. The agency has to send their dossiers to the DC Embassy. They were getting backed up and taking a while to get through there so she made arrangements to use the NY Embassy. Well the DC embassy said the packets had to go throught them. So I will have to resend the new fees for DC and wait on them. It has been about two weeks and I haven't received my old money orders back, so I'm hoping that she was able to get my packet through NY. With the holiday everyone is away, so I wont find out for sure till Monday.