Surprise!

We’re Adopting!!! 

We are so excited to announce that we are adopting from Ukraine!  Adoption is something that has been on our hearts for a few years now and for the last several months we have felt a very strong calling to start our family through adoption.  So we finally listened and took the initial leap by submitting an application to an adoption agency, who approved us to begin working towards bringing home our child from Ukraine.

We have received many questions about why Ukraine and how the process works.  We would love to share this journey with you and hope that you will follow our blog and our story along the way.  Our reasons for choosing adoption and Ukraine will come in a later post but here is what we know now about the journey ahead:

Adopting from Ukraine is a bit different than it is with other countries.  Normally you would be matched with a child in the country you are adopting from and then when it’s time, go to that country to pick them up and bring them home.  Ukraine currently has a blind referral system, meaning we will get an invitation to travel from Ukraine’s government once all of our paperwork has been approved.  Once we arrive we will have an appointment at an adoption office where they will show us profiles of a few children who should meet the preferences we requested.  We will then be able to choose a child from the profiles we’ve seen and go to the orphanage to meet them.  This is where adopting from Ukraine can become unpredictable in that there could be a chance the child we originally chose is no longer available for adoption (their profile was already seen and selected by another family), the children in the profiles may not meet the preferences we have requested leaving us unable to choose one, or the child could even choose not to be adopted by us as the court system in Ukraine does allow the child to say yes or no.

Children are placed on the international adoption registry when they are about 6 years old so the child we adopt will most likely be between the ages of 6-9.  Some younger children are placed on the adoption registry if they have a certain medical diagnosis, some of which we are open to so a child younger than 6 could be a possibility.  The entire process from beginning to end can take anywhere from 9-12 months or longer.  For us it will be largely dependent on how quickly we can raise the funds for each step along the way.  We know it won’t be an easy journey but it’s what we know God has called us to do in this season.  We couldn’t be more excited about expecting our first child who is, right now, growing in our hearts!