What's Happened Thus Far -- Or, Alternately, That Obligatory First Blog Post

Very early on in our relationship, my now-husband and I began to discuss the idea of international adoption. I had told him that I was unable to have biological kids as the result of medical treatment.  His immediate response was that he was open to adoption, and this was only three weeks after we had met.

We discussed countries, rather briefly, and thought that Russia was the best fit for us as a couple -- the children were fairly young and we both like Russian culture, despite not being Russian ourselves.

Time passed, and we got married in May of 2010.  I petitioned the government for my husband's immigration case to proceed, despite being stalled for quite some time.  As that started to proceed, we purchased a home and started looking deeper into adoption.  We found an agency that was local to us and attended one of their seminars, but never got farther than that, knowing we would need to save money before we could actually officially begin the process.

And so we moved into our new home, adopted a puppy from the local shelter, and my husband began to focus on building up his career.

Then, around Christmas 2012, the bomb dropped.  Russia closed it's adoption program for American citizens.  Meanwhile, Congress failed to renew the tax credit for adoption.  The loss and fear and uncertainty was difficult, to say the least.  I found myself wondering if we would ever become parents.  How would we ever afford it without the tax credit?  Where would we go, if Russia remained closed?

We looked at "our" agency's other programs, and found ourselves unenthusiastic about all of them.  So, we began facing the reality that we would very likely have to switch agencies.  I returned to the website of another local agency, one that we had ruled out early on because they only worked with couples who had been married three years or more.  While they could no longer offer Russian adoption, they did have suggestions for families who were hoping to adopt from Russia.  Of all of them, Kazakhstan seemed like our best fit.

Shortly there after, the tax credit was renewed again, and we were well on our way to affording our adoption.

Since then, we filled out an application, paid an application fee, received homestudy info, paid for the first phase of the homestudy, scheduled our first two classes, filled out an inch of paperwork, scheduled fingerprinting, and ordered some of our required reading books.  And we know we aren't even half done, but that, in the end, it will all be worth it.