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!

Dossier Update- COMPLETE!

Our dossier is officially in the mail!  The last few days have been a whirlwind of miracles.  During our phone consultation with our program director on Friday, we found out we needed to update one document for each of us, just to make sure it was dated as close to submission as possible.  We immediately contacted the person we needed to have update this document which wasn't a problem, but then we still needed to find a traveling notary who could notarize it as soon as possible and then send it off to the state capital to get an apostille.  And we were still waiting on our background checks to come back with the apostilles as well, which, as of Monday, looked to still be a ways out since our payment hadn't even been processed yet.  Then God began to work in miraculous ways.  We were able to find a notary who could notarize the documents for us on Monday, After picking up the notarized documents we came home to find our background checks in the mail (in the self-addressed, stamped envelope we had sent them with, but with no return post-mark on it...).  Eric was able to leave work a few minutes early and take our updated, notarized documents to the state capital for same-day apostilles on Tuesday.  We had been praying for well over a month that we would be able to submit our dossier by Valentine's Day, even though that seemed impossible the closer it got.  But God moved in many ways, had His hand on our documents, and we had every document completed on the day we prayed for.  Today our dossier went out in the mail.  It will first go to our agency for them to look over and then, if everything looks good, be submitted to Ukraine, hopefully sometime next week.  

Please pray with us that there won't be any documents that we need to redo and that Ukraine will accept it right away.  Please also continue to pray with us that we will have the finances as we need them.  Now that our dossier is complete we are likely only a few months away from traveling, but still have about $13,000 more in adoption fees, not including travel costs.  This seems so overwhelming to us at times but seeing how God just worked a few more miracles these last couple days reminds us how He called us to this journey and will continue to work throughout it.  If you feel led to support our adoption financially you can view our YouCaring page at the link in the upper right hand corner of this page or our Just Love Coffee fundraiser through the link below that.  Additionally, donations can be mailed directly to our agency with our name attached (MLJ Adoptions, 617 E North St. Indianapolis, IN 46204) and are tax deductible. We are so grateful for all of your prayers and your support as each day brings us closer to finding our little one!

 

Dossier Update- Almost Complete!

We are officially waiting on only ONE document (for each of us) to come back with an apostille!!  We received all of our certified and notarized documents a couple of weeks ago and immediately got them sent back out in the mail for apostilles.  We got our last few documents back from Washington this last Saturday with, unfortunately, the wrong kind of authentication on each one.  Fortunately, it was a simple fix that we were able to take care of in person today.  This means that 43 out of 45 documents are officially prepared, twice, and copied, twice.  We are only waiting on our FBI background checks to come back with apostilles from Washington D.C., which we are praying will be any day now.  Since that is the very last thing we are waiting on, we have scheduled a phone consultation with our program director for this Friday to go through everything before we mail one complete official dossier, one complete copied dossier, and one complete digital copy of our dossier to our agency.  They will then go through it in person to make sure we have prepared all of the documents correctly and if we have, submit it to Ukraine to be translated and submitted to their government.

Please continue to pray that we have prepared all of these documents correctly the first time, as well as that our background checks will come back to us this week so that everything can be submitted to our agency by early next week.  And as always, please continue to pray for the financial piece of this journey.  We still have a long ways to go financially, but know that God will continue to provide what we need, as we need it.

Trying to get all of the piles organized!!

Dossier Update- 3

It looks like we are getting so close to having all of our dossier documents prepared!!  Today was especially exciting because we received our approval letter from US Immigration granting us official permission to adopt from Ukraine! 

So here's where we currently stand: We are waiting on one more document to come back from the state of Oregon with an apostille, hopefully by early next week. We have a couple things we need to have fixed on both of our medical forms, hopefully within the next day or two, and then will send off the last few documents to the state of Washington to receive apostilles.  And lastly that ONE document we are still waiting to get our hands on (just so we can immediately put it back in the mail to the east coast again for an apostille): FBI background checks.  Our prayers were answered last week when we saw the charge for it on our credit card, which means it has arrived where it needs to be and should be in process right now.  This was the first dossier document we started working on back in November and looks like it will be the last one to be completed!  So many of our documents have been coming back to us so quickly despite the holiday season and inclement weather, so we continue to hold out hope and pray that these will arrive any day now. 

As soon as we have these last few dossier documents completely prepared, we will meet with our program director to make sure everything has been prepared completely and accurately.  Once it has, the dossier will be sent to Ukraine where it will be translated and sent to the central authority in charge of adoptions.  

Please pray with us that we have prepared all of these documents correctly the first time.  We have worked hard and asked tons of questions to try and ensure everything is as complete as possible and are prayerful we won't experience any unexpected delays with submitting our dossier.  Please pray that we receive our FBI background checks very soon and that the apostille process (for all of our last few documents) will be quick.

We are in the process of working on another fundraising opportunity too! We should have details to share in the next couple weeks!