Another Form Bites the Dust

Today marks the day we start dancing with the Department of Homeland Security because we submitted our application to bring a child back from foreign soil! We're told this form of bureacracy can take 30-90 days! We can hardly wait...but apparently we'll have to!

If you're reading this blog you obviously care about us and this will come as great news...neither Gina or I have HIV, Syphillis, or Hepatitis B! Surprise...:-)! Here's an interesting fact...most Americans are not immunized against Hep. B! If you're 21 and under or in the medical field, you probably are. Neither of us are and for a mere $800 Alegent Health will take care of that immunization for both of us! We did find a couple places that take care of it cheaper...but for one of them you have to go through an STD test...I won't go into the details of that, but I went through one unecessarily (this happened in the early stages of the adoption process) and I vowed never to do it again...EVER! So, we'll be praying about the option of immunizing ourselves, but that's not super high on the priority list right now.

One last piece of news...hopefully our home study will be approved in the next couple weeks so we can finalize a major piece of the puzzle and also apply for grants. We're also still waiting on Gina's passport, but once we get that highly prized piece of ID in we will be able to put together a large portion of our dossier (our legal representation of us to the Ukrainian government). Everything has to be notarized and we're thankful to have a friend who's a notary! From there it's on to the state offices to get them state certified! After the cerification we'll ship off all the forms to our adoption agency, they'll send them to Ukraine for translation, and then they'll be submitted to the national government there. Not sure how long all that will take, but it sounds like a lot of red tape so we're praying for an expedited process!

We're both excited to get to the point where the paperwork is done and we wait on the invitation to head overseas to meet our new little girl!