Happy 2010!

We just received positive feedback concerning our position in Petro and expect to see our Letter of Invitation very soon; likely travelling within the next few months!

While we have had almost 3 years of waiting, it feels now we're in a mad rush to prepare for our trip - frantic yet exciting!

CIS Approval

We got it, we got it!! Yesterday in our mailbox, among Christmas cards, was a letter from the CIS saying that we are approved (again)!

"It has been determined that you are able to furnish proper care to an orphan(s) as defined in Section 101 (B)(1)(F) of the Immigration and Nationality Act."

Tomorrow we will get it notarized and get it sent to our agency to be translated! We are so pumped that we got this before Christmas - the last of our paperwork...for hopefully the last time!!

Update!!

Happy Birthday Dustin! What a great day to finally hear something about our adoption!!

What we heard today is that all of our updated paperwork was sent to the translator yesterday. Once all the documents have been translated, our updated dossier will be ready to send to Kaz! As of now, we are working towards having our dossier hand-delivered (in-country) in early January 2010. The only hitch right now is that we are still waiting on our updated CIS Approval (Immigration form needed to bring our child home to the US). We really need to get that approval back ASAP so that it can be sent to translation and not hold the process up! We are hounding our local CIS office and hope to hear something back from them soon! We are crossing our fingers and hoping to receive travel dates in early 2010!

--Cortney

Still Waiting

What's the saying, "no news is good news"??

Our changes of intent have been received in Kaz and we continue to wait patiently for our invitation to visit. We're just under 28 months from the start of our journey and hope to round the last bend any day now.

Family and friends have been the cornerstone of our sanity over this long wait and will be that much more important in months to come. For the lack of a better expression, we simply can't wait to share our experience in Kaz and this new chapter in our lives.

Cortney & Dustin

Photos

Here are a couple new pictures that my friend Amy took of us.

Translations

Here's the latest update on our journey...

All paperwork has been updated, notarized and apostilled. Next step is translation. After everything is translated into Russian, our updated packet will be sent to Kazakhstan. As all things in this process, it takes TIME!

We still have no idea when we will be traveling, but are crossing our fingers that it is late summer/early fall.

We've been doing a lot of research on Petropavlovsk and think that we will both be able to work, at least somewhat, while we are over there. We are so glad to be able to work while we are there to help pass the time and still stay "connected" to our work families.

Dustin and I have updated our paperwork to read that we are open to adopting a child 6mos - 36mos in age; as well as a sibling group, with the oldest sibling being no older than 36mos. We've been working on name options and reading up on toddler adoptions, developmental delays and all the other things that we think might be helpful to us. If any of you have good reading recommendations - let me know.


--Cortney & Dustin

Update

Hey everyone! No bigs news to report, but wanted to keep you updated on what's happening. We have finished updating all of our paperwork that had expired and soon Kazahkstan will have a fresh, updated copy of everything! The update took a little longer than we thought with some hold-ups with our doctors and notaries! Now that our paperwork is updated, we really need to focus on learning Russian! April of 2007 is when we first started the adoption process and it has been 2 years this month! Crazy to think that it has been this long, but we keep telling ourselves that we must be getting close to the end!

This weekend we went to Target and started the Stone Family Pharmacy! We stocked up on all the meds we could possibly need while in Kaz for us and the little Stone!

Keep your fingers crossed for us and hopefully we will hear some news soon!

Love,
Cortney & Dustin