I am very excited to say that we have an update to post already!!  We just heard from Bethany that our dossier has been translated to Spanish and was delivered to Los Pisingos today!  Los Pisingos will now review the dossier.  We are waiting for the official word that the we are registered with Los Pisingos.  This will hopefully only take a couple of weeks.  At that point, we will be put on the waiting list.  I will send you another update as soon as I have one!

Thanks to everyone who has shared their kind thoughts since our original posting.  We really appreciate your thoughts and prayers!

The beginning of our journey

Where to begin?  This journey has been such a huge part of our lives for several months so it is hard to sit down and put it into words.  We still have a long way to go, but we wanted to share our experience thus far as well as give you an idea of what still lies ahead of us.

The decision to adopt is one that we made several years ago.  Little did we know that there would be so many decisions to make!  After carefully considering the differences between adopting domestically and internationally, we decided to pursue adopting from Colombia.  We were fortunate enough to meet a great group of families who have also adopted from Colombia.  I don’t know how we would have made it this far without their help and support (special thanks to Glenn and Becky!!).

We submitted our initial application to Bethany Christian Services in April of 2011.  Once the application was approved, the next step in the process was the dreaded home study!  I asked early on about what kinds of things people would ‘fail’ their home studies for.  The answer was things like a criminal background – phew, I don’t think we have to worry about that!!  It sounds ridiculous now that I’m writing it, but I was seriously concerned that since we have two dogs they might think we have too much dog hair in our house!  Our home study was actually pretty painless.  There are of course a million questions to answer, but we were very comfortable with our case worker which helped with the process.

It took several months for our home study to be finalized, but by Thanksgiving we were ready to start compiling our dossier.  This is the massive packet of documentation that gets sent to Colombia for review and approval.  For those of you that know me, you will not have a hard time believing that I created a spreadsheet to track all of our paperwork. J Between requesting documents from various agencies, making sure that we were timing everything right so that nothing expired before we could submit it, and getting everything notarized and apostilled, I never would have made it through without my spreadsheet!!  I can tell you that if you can be cleared to adopt internationally, you can probably be cleared for almost anything.  We’ve been cleared through Homeland Security, the FBI, and our local police.  Our doctor has signed off on our health, and we’ve had our employment and finances verified.  I’m glad that these processes are in place because I’m sure they do more good than harm, but it can definitely be overwhelming at times!

So, where are we now?  All of our paperwork in the U.S. is completed – at least everything that needs to be done at this point.  Our paperwork went down to Colombia on March 22.  It will need to be translated to Spanish, and then it will be sent to Los Pisingos, which is the adoption house in Bogota.  They will review our application and once it is approved, we will be put on the waiting list.  We really don’t know how long the waiting list is, but we were told that we would have a better idea once we are actually on the list.  We’re hoping that we’ll have our referral yet in 2012, but we really don’t know.  Once we get our referral, there will be another round of paperwork that needs to be done, but hopefully at that point it will only take six weeks or so before we can go down to Colombia.  We’ll be in Colombia for six to nine weeks but at the end of our stay there we should be able to bring our child home!  Some countries require you to make multiple trips before you can bring your child back to the U.S.  We really like the fact that the Colombia program only requires one trip – even though it’s a long one!

We’ll be updating our blog as we have updates, but they might be few and far between for a few months.  We’re so excited to continue on this journey, and we’re glad you’re sharing it with us!! J