Our Adoption Journey

We start this blog today as a way for our family and friends to follow us in our amazing adoption journey to find our little girl. This process began back in 2004 when we decided to adopt after trying to have a child for 9 years, with no pregnancy. We began to gather information about adoption, and we attended many adoption group meetings. In April of 2006 we learned of an adoption group meeting at a church in Knoxville sponsored by America World Adoptions. After the meeting, and the video, there was not a dry eye in the room. We knew that our hearts belonged to Russia, and we would find our little girl there.
We started the paperwork called our dossier for the "paper pregnancy"
of our journey. After gathering all of our paperwork and having had a home study complete, we were ready to send our dossier to Russia in October 2006. Unfortunately at the time our dossier was sent in, re-accreditation had put a hold on all international Russian adoptions. Our agency along with all of the other agency's in the U.S. had to reapply to be able to work through Russia. This delayed all adoptions out of Russia until July 2007. In July we learned that our agency's umbrella company had gotten their re-accreditation, and the adoption's could begin again. While waiting through re-accreditation our dossier was expiring. All paperwork expires after a year, so we had to work on keeping it up to date. As the fall and winter of 2007 approached we started to hear of movement in Russia with families getting referrals and of families traveling to bring their children home. We were told that we should hear something in the spring of 2008 about getting officially registered in our region.
We got a call from America World in January and was told that we would probably be registered in Krasnoyarsk Russia. As we started to work on region specific documents for this region, we knew the day had to be getting close. We then got a call from Kristen at our agency, and she said that we were officially registered for Krasnoyarsk Russia as of March 2008!!!! We were so excited!!! All of the paperwork and the waiting was finally coming to and end. When will we get our referral??? It can't be that far away....