We're In!

We were notified this week that our representative in Ukraine was finally able to submit our paperwork to the SDA (State Department for Adoption)! Ukraine only accepts 8 dossiers from Americans each week. We were really glad to get the news, especially since this means we likely won’t have to update any of our paperwork. It’s estimated that we will be traveling to Ukraine in October and/or November.

In the meantime, things in Ukraine continue to be unstable. The following 3 paragraphs contain info we got from our adoption agency:

Due to changes in procedure, there are delays in getting passports for adopted children. The Kiev office said they expect wait times for processing passport applications to be 10 days, but some parents have reported waiting more than a month!

They are also seeing increasing timeframes for submitting dossiers [ours finally got in, woo hoo!]. Some political fighting within the SDA has slowed down the submission and review of paperwork. Ukraine has always been a volatile country to adopt from based on the close ties to the country's politics which have lacked stability.

This summer there have been more families requiring second appointments because they were not referred young, healthy children. The wait time between appointments is currently 2-4 weeks. They expect the number of children available for adoption to increase in the coming months.

So now, our original 4-6 weeks in Ukraine is expected to be closer to 6-8 weeks! Fortunately, we will probably have the choice of either staying the entire time in country (I think NO!) or taking one, 3-to-4-week trip, then one or both of us returning a month later for 1 week.

Please continue to pray for our journey. It’s all a little crazy, but we really believe God is calling us to this.

Davi started all-day kindergarten this week, so I’m anticipating being able to get a lot of preparations done before we bring our other child home. We’re thankful for how God has provided for us in ways like this and others (like supportive friends/family and financial gifts—thank you!!!).

We’ll let you know when we receive our travel date!