Our Adoption Timeline

Below is our Timeline, in reverse order (Oldest steps at the bottom, updated March 21st, 2008. It's amazing how many events occurred on the one year anniversary of a prior event...).

November:
22nd - Thanksgiving (And we have MUCH to be thankful for this year!)
21st - Trek Home on Day 57 of our adventure
20th - Embassy Appointment (Also the 1 year anniversary of our I-171)
16th - Medical checkup at the SOS Clinic
15th - Passports and exit Visas received
12th - Trek to Almaty
9th - Submit Passport Applications (9th (hopefully) or 10th)
9th - New Birth Certificates
9th - Custody of the Kids!
8th - Completion of Waiting Period
4th - 12th - Kids School Break, get to see them a lot!

October:
29th - Cathe arrival in Memphis
27th - Cathe returning home (flew to Almaty Saturday, Monday flight to Memphis, Bill holding down the fort in Petropavlovsk)
25 Oct - 8 Nov - 15 day Waiting Period
24th - Court (also the one year anniversary of our Homestudy approval)
16th -23rd - Waiting for court
3rd -16th - Bonding period
3rd - MOE approval to go to Regional Boarding school. Met the right two children, and began bonding process.
2nd - Didn't work out in Airtau, so we're returning to Petropavlovsk. There are just too many issues.
1st - Travel to Airtau orphanage, first meeting with two children. Some pending legal issues are likely to complicate matters.

September 2007:
29 - 30th - Sight Seeing in Petropavlovsk
28th - 5:10 am arrival in Almaty, 9:30 am flight to Petropavlovsk, meeting with MOE rep
27th - 7 Hour lay-over in Amsterdam
26th - Booked on the 7 pm flight out of Memphis. Today is also the one year anniversary of Tobe's passing. We hope that he has indeed told God which children we should be going to meet and bring home.
10th - Plane tickets and Visas in hand!
6th - We have made travel arrangements! We leave on Sept 26th!

August 2007:
30th - LOI in hand! Now the real scrambling begins as we enter the home stretch of the home game and prepare to hit the road!
7th - Our paperwork has been assigned to the Petropavlovsk region! Next step: LOI

July 2007:
16th - Update from coordinator: Looks like late Spetember will be a good time to travel. He's now working to get our LOI issued.
We met a very nice couple in our area who just returned with their new son, Will. Congratulations David and Amy!

June 2007:
27th - Still waiting. After a brief "vacation," our paperwork was delivered to the MFA on May 18th. No word yet on forward progress to the MOE. Until then, there's no Letter of Invitation (LOI) which means no travel visas, which means we still have no idea when we will actually head "Over There." Meanwhile, we're getting excited again since we're receiving regional info from our coordinator.

May 2007:
17th - Paperwork has been located! It will be delivered to the Minister of Foreign Affairs (MFA) office tomorrow after another unplanned two week delay... 8-(
10th - Although "Delivered," our paperwork is not in the proper hands...
9th - "Victory Day" in Kazakhstan, government offices are closed...
4th - A check Saturday morning indicates that our paperwork arrived on Friday!
4th - FedEx tracking number indicates package is in Almaty. Est delivery to Astana is Monday the 7th.

Apr 2007:
27th - FedEx tracking number indicates that our package left the Consulate today, en route to Kazakhstan.! Today is also the anniversary of our first meeting with our Social Worker.
12th - Dossier finally on its way to the Consulate.
2nd - Revised documents have been apostilled and translated.

Mar 2007:
30th - We have all revised documents in hand but needed to have them apostilled. So we drove up to Nashville and got the originals in the mail and scans to our translator. Hard to believe that a year has now passed since we started the process...
After several attempts to get things moving along, we withdrew our application from the Memphis agency and are now working directly with the country coordinator. When our agency lost headway and stopped answering phone messages and e-mails in a timely manner, we had no other choice. Hopefully we do not lose much time in the process. The last straw was when the translator discovered that the medical form provided by the agency did not contain the information required by Kazakhstan (note: download/use the Form from the Kazakh Embassy web site!). When the translator did not receive a response from the agency, she contacted us and we had already resolved the issue by the time the agency contacted us. We now have confirmation that our Coordinator has our paperwork, but there's another glitch: We need to remove references to our former agency and replace them with notarized pages from another licenses agency... It would be easy to quit at this point, but we really want to adopt, so we're plowing ahead despite the extra work.

Feb 2007:
Final documents being translated and apostilled. The translator (not the agency) gave us a heads-up that several documents would be expiring before submission (e.g. homestudy agency license) and needed to be updated to ensure our application would be accepted. The agency had to obtain new apostilles for the revised documents, resulting in an additional delay. We'll go into more detail after we have completed our travels... (not happy with agency performance!)

Jan 2007:
31st - Meeting with Agency Manager/Owner to discuss our concerns about poor agency performance...
Reviewing our documents, which still have not gone to the embassy, we noted that the home study agency license will be expiring at the end of the month. We need an update! (we found the issue, not our agency). Our paperwork finally went to the translator on the 16th.
When we pressed for updated information regarding the children she told us about back in September, the agency owner indicated that they had been adopted. Apparently that happened shortly after she shared the info, but she never told us...
We are investigating options for moving our application to another agency...


Dec 2006:
Still waiting for updates. Our agency is not responding. Initially we hoped that all of our paperwork would go to the embassy by the 1st, but we still didn't get our FBI background check back until the 18th. 11 1/2 weeks for something that should have only taken 3-4. They must really have a back-log. Meanwhile, the agency just notified us that none of our paperwork went to the translator before she went to Russia for 3 weeks over the holidays...

Nov 2006:
20th - We received our USCIS approval letter on the 21st! All of our paperwork, except FBI check has been delivered to the agency.

Oct 2006:
25th - We finally got our USCIS appointment. (It took a couple more follow-up visits to deliver everything that they didn't ask for on the first visit though.)
24th - Homestudy Approved!

Sep 2006:
We have picked an agency to work with. It's small, but has a long history and is close to where we live, so we can drop off paperwork as needed. The agency has information on two children who meet our criterion. We're VERY excited!
26th - A sad day. Today we said goodbye to Tobe, our faithful and loving 13 year old Golden Retriever. Laura, our insightful neighbor, made the comment that now Tobe could go to heaven and tell God which children we need to bring home. A cheering thought on a sad day.

Aug 2006:
We have finally decided on a country: Kazakhstan. That wasn't anywhere we had initially considered, but Russia and Ukraine programs are still closed. Cathe has been interviewing agencys since we'll have to choose one soon...

Jul 2006:
Lots of vacations! We headed out to Washington state for a couple weeks. Our social worker took her vacation right after we got back, so the month didn't see much progress. We did receive our passports though.

Jun 2006:
Gathering paperwork for our dossier. Had a few meetings with our social worker to discuss some other thoughts and questions. We have decided that we should adopt two children, either a boy and a girl or two boys, but would also consider two girls.

May 2006:
After an initial meeting with our social worker in April, we have decided to complete the Home Study through Catholic Services. What an education our first couple of meetings have been!

Apr 2006:
27th - Our first meeting with our Social Worker.
Bill's job transfer ended up being a local one, so we won't be moving this summer. Now we can get into the actual adoption process. Cathe sent off for information packages from several agencies and we have begun checking on home study requirements.

Mar 2006:
After talking about adoption for a while now, we're getting serious. Although Bill has been "penciled in" for another job assignment in the local area, we can't get started until we have something firm.