When it snows, it's a blizzard!

Another month's gone by, but this time we have some really good news to report!  We have received a referral for a 2 and a half year old beautiful girl (who we will refer to from now on as baby "D")!  After e-mailing back and forth between our agency's coordinator with the Russian coordinator and the Russian adoption board, we passed all their questions and were approved!  But (seems like there is always a but these past 3 years) there was a problem when they were going through her paperwork.  Turns out another Russian family had visited her, and while they verbally said "no" to adopting her they did not sign the paperwork.  So we had to wait for them to be contacted. The problem with that was they were away on vacation with no way to contact them.  The Russian board then decided to send them a letter saying they had 30 days to respond.  And the wait began again.

After a dinner out with the family on Friday, and some shopping around for some organization ideas for our office and laundry room, we came home to a blinking light on our answering machine.  Hayden hits the play button and we hear our coordinator's voice and listen intently to THE wonderful news.  Hayden does his little jumps with a huge smile on his face, Mel's face brightens up, and my heart starts racing...our coordinator informs us that baby "D" is now our official referral and we can legally proceed to adopt her!

Later that evening, we received our registration papers in our email to fill out and a list of pictures to take of our house and her room.  After filling them out we'll resend them to our coordinator to make sure we filled them out correctly, then get them notarized and return to Chicago to have them apostilled.  After Russia approves them, which may take about 3 weeks, we can travel for our first visit to meet baby "D".  Hopefully, March will be our target month.

In the meantime, a blizzard heads our way starting tomorrow afternoon until Wednesday afternoon.  Predictions say we may get up to 20 inches of snow, with possibly 8 to 10 foot (yes foot) snow drifts!  Excited for a snow day, not so sure I'm too excited about shoveling it all though.

Fingers crossed all goes well from here on out!
Michael

Posted by Mel at 8:19 PM