APPROVED!

Friday morning we got the email from our program director we had been anxiously waiting for and praying for, for 6 weeks and 1 day: Out dossier is officially approved and registered by Ukraine!  This is such a huge answer to prayer to be approved the first time and another big step completed in our journey.  We are now waiting to receive our appointment date in country and will be able to make plans to travel a couple days prior to that. Please pray with us that we would receive this date very soon! Also that once we have a date we will be able to make travel plans smoothly.  And, as usual, for continued finances as our trip draws nearer.

Still Waiting...

It's been 40 days since we submitted our dossier and we still have no news.  We have been hoping every day since we hit the four week mark we might hear of our official approval any day.  The waiting is complicated by knowing there is still a chance that something in our dossier could be rejected, which means we would need to make changes, resubmit, and wait all over again.  Some families have needed to submit multiple times before receiving approval.  Oh how we are praying we will get approval the first time!  Fortunately we have been busy with work and other things so the wait has not yet felt excruciating (though I may be checking my email more than a few times a day!).  We are desperate to get word of approval though, knowing that would be one more step conquered, so would greatly appreciate prayers that it would come this week!

In other news we held a successful garage sale fundraiser earlier this month and raised over $560 for our adoption expenses!  We are planning to have one more in June so would appreciate prayers for that to be successful as well. 

Hopefully we will be writing again soon to share good news about our approval! In the meantime please pray with us!

Dossier Submission!!

After more than a month's worth of delays amidst a wild paper chase, we finally got confirmation that our dossier was able to be submitted to the DFC (Department of Families and Children) in Ukraine!! Our official submission date was April 13th.  We now wait to receive an appointment date, hopefully in two months or less, and pray that all of our paperwork will be accepted as is, and not need anything else before we are able to move forward.

We still have quite a bit of money to raise (about $10,000) for the rest of the adoption fees, as well as travel costs.  We will be having a garage sale fundraiser next month so are actively seeking donations and praying for it to be successful. We also still have our YouCaring page up and running (visit it here) and would greatly appreciate anyone willing to share it on social media and elsewhere.

It has been quite an emotional roller coaster these last two months.  Two months ago we thought we were finished gathering paperwork and were ready to send everything to Ukraine to be translated, only to find out there was one more thing we needed.  And then a week or so later, one more document we needed.  And then another. What a relief it is now to know that it has finally been submitted!  Now we pray for a quick acceptance by the DFC and peace in this waiting time.

Dossier Delays

It feels like so much has happened, yet also like nothing has happened in the last few weeks.... In short our dossier has still not been submitted to the SDA in Ukraine.  After it was received by our agency's in country staff in Ukraine, they noticed one of our documents needed to be changed. We got that taken care of within a week and on the same day it was put in the mail to Ukraine, we found out there was another document we needed to add to our dossier for our submission as well.  We are currently working on getting this document completed as quickly as possible. None of this is the fault of us or our agency, there are just so many unknowns with Ukraine adoption right now and things can change quickly, thus requiring changes or additional documents.  We are doing our best to stay positive even though we still can't see any light at the end of the tunnel. YET. We know everything will be completed in God's timing and continue to trust His plan for this journey, even though it hasn't been as easy these last couple weeks.

PLEASE pray with us that this will be the final document we need for our dossier and that we will be able to submit to the SDA by the first week of April.  Please also pray with us that the entire SDA process would start picking up speed for all families currently in process. And finally, please pray for our own continued endurance throughout this journey.

Dossier on the Way!

Our dossier is now on its way to Ukraine and should arrive by the first of next week!  It will then be translated by our agency's in-country staff and submitted to the government for approval.  However, the unknowns that lie ahead are huge.  At the beginning of the year Ukraine started having a new committee approve dossiers prior to being officially allowed to proceed with the adoption of a specific child.  This is after a family's dossier has already been approved by one organization, a child met, and referral accepted.  Right now it is creating HUGE hurdles for many families who are in process or even already in country.  It sounds like many dossiers have been rejected at this stage due to this new committee highly scrutinizing every piece of the dossier (after it was already previously accepted).  Even though our dossier is already on its way to Ukraine, we are talking with our home study and adoption agencies about creating an amendment to our home study which would, hopefully, better outline the special needs we are approved to adopt.  However, we are also currently unsure if the committee is even accepting amendments, like Ukraine used to.  We do know the US Embassy is working on trying to get clearer guidelines from the committee on what they want to see, and we, along with all other families currently in process, are hoping they will give more specific information soon, so we can know what to expect.

Thus the waiting and uncertainty begins...Right now we are asking for huge prayers that all of this will NOT slow down or hinder our process. We are still hopeful that we will be traveling to Ukraine within the next couple of months, but trusting God's timing will be perfect regardless.

Minor Changes

After getting some more clarification yesterday on what needed to be fixed in our dossier, we ended up with 7 documents that needed minor changes.  Fortunately, a few of them were so minor we have been able to completely fix three of them already (at no cost!!), possibly four. We are just waiting to hear back from our agency's staff in Ukraine to see if the changes we made on the fourth one are acceptable.  We decided we would send things via email to them now before mailing everything, just to make sure we've done it completely correct this time! :)  After that we have only one more document that we are responsible for fixing and then will need to wait on other agencies for the last two.  But for tonight we are feeling positive and much less overwhelmed then we were two nights ago.  We remain hopeful that we will have everything fixed and ready to resubmit to our agency next week.  The ups and downs in this journey are certainly incredible at times- and we still have a long way to go!

Hurdles Before Submission

One thing is for sure- the adoption journey is NOT an easy journey!!  After a week and a half of so much coming together so quickly, today we were hit with another hurdle.  Our agency received our completed dossier last Friday and after their review yesterday, they let us know that everything looked to be great!  Today we got word that our agency's staff in Ukraine wanted minor changes made on several of our documents because, as we've been told countless times, Ukraine is extremely picky on how documents are prepared.  Our program director was even unsure about a few of the changes they were requesting so is waiting for more clarification before we start on the changes.  Right now we ask for prayers that these changes will either end up not being a problem after all or will be very simple to fix without costing us too much time and money.  We are still praying that our completed dossier will be submitted to Ukraine by the end of the month and trusting that God will, once again, get us over this hurdle.  In the meantime we have learned to go with the flow and will hopefully have good news to share in the next couple of days!