Today, Greg gave me the ‘official go-ahead’ to add to our b-l-o-g!! This is soooo new to us but will try to pretend I am sending each of you a personal update on our exciting chapter to our lives…..hope you will enjoy sharing our experiences with us.
Having started on this journey over 2 ½ years ago, it finally looks like things are starting to move forward….bit – by –bit…and for that we are ever so grateful. On August 16, 2005 our dossier was submitted to the NAC in Ukraine by our translator, Inna, who will even be in more closer contact with us during the months to come. Joe and Dr. Carol have kept us organized from their offices at Adopt Abroad in Pennsylvania and Europe and each of them have given us great encouragement to continue on. So, Greg and I are very appreciative of each of the three of them who help us as a support team…..especially when I, Arlene, get so over-concerned and start emailing letters like crazy to each of them. Glad they are so well equipped to handle the ‘Nervous Nellies’ like me.
As ‘older’ adoptive parents getting ready to complete our family with ‘older’ children this is a bit amusing to us. First of all, in Ukraine an ‘older’ child is anyone over the age of 4-5 years of age. The ‘older’ parent now is considered one who is in their 50-70’s and has often raised their children or their children’s children and have the ‘maturity’ and time to devote to their endeavors. In our case, Greg was a bachelor (oooh hope he doesn’t regret those years…) until nearly 50 years of age and I had been married previously and helped raise three beautiful stepdaughters. Greg and I are looking forward to having an opportunity to raise a child/children together AND our stepdaughters are as excited about it as we are. We hope to adopt siblings either boys or girls and most likely they will be in the age range of 8-13. This is especially rewarding to me as I had a wonderful son who I adopted domestically but lost him several years ago in an accident.
The Yahoo forums have been just great in despensing info from so many people who are in the process of adopting. During the last few weeks, Kendra, Cara-domme, Lynn, and KT have been instrumental in giving us additional input on the Ukrainian scene involving adoptions. They have adopted from Ukraine and we enjoy looking at some of their blogs and this has been a great help to us.
Our folks live in White Bear Lake, Minnesota and have offered to come up to Alaska to watch the place….pet the dog…..put up with the cat…..while we are in Ukraine so even though they are from a place where it gets a little chilly in the winter; we hope that the 30-day mandatory time will be waived by the time we get ready to travel. Not sure what day we will be given by NAC but will post it on this blog as soon as we
know.
