Home Study Paperwork is done

Yippee!! We have completed our home study paperwork and our adoption classes. Monday evening is our final visit from our social worker. It took us less than two weeks to gather all of our paperwork for our home study. I had a jump start on it since I was reading up on what is all necessary. Our social worker told us the last time I spoke with her last week that it would be four weeks for completion, so hopefully just three weeks to go. It is all dependent on the background checks coming in to her. Oh, I forgot hopefully the social worker will approve us?? Never know we might have scared her off with our bickering.

Anyway, we decided on an adoption agency last week, Adoption Options in San Diego, California. For those of you unfamiliar with international adoption, it really doesn't matter where your agency is located since they must be recognized by the foreign government. They have come very highly recommended to us by several different families. The final decision came when some people we have become acquainted with through a Russian adoption message board were in country adopting two babies and encountered some pretty big challenges and Adoption Options staff handled it all for them.

We are now starting on our dossier, which is referred to as "the paper chase". It is a bunch of paperwork that has to be notarized, apostilled with your state's Secretary of State, etc. and then translated before being submitted to the Russian government for approval by them for you to adopt. This might be a long process, I am hoping that my background in the legal field will help me. Of course I have already been acquiring a lot of what I have been told is needed so I am hoping to have a jump start on it. I understand we need very thorough physicals and psychiatric evaluations. Those are scary for us since you all know we are just a little on the crazy side, both of us!!

By the way, Brynn is very excited to have a new little brother in the house. Michelle and Stephanie are very supportive but of course all three think we are a little nuts starting all over when they are just about adults. See I said we are crazy. They all want to go to Russia too. We will see how things pan out on that front. Everyone says the trips are pretty hectic with adoption things each day. Not really a vacation but we plan to add a few days on to one of the two trips to be tourists. It will be whichever trip is in the nicest time of the year. If we end up with both trips in the dead of winter we may not be tourists but wait until the little guy is older to visit his home country.

We are off camping this weekend for Easter. It will be interesting to camp once our little guy arrives. At some point I need to put pictures of the Airstream and the girls on here.

Happy Easter!!!