Why We Can No Longer Watch Animal Planet

We will be having a new addition to our family....an Oriental ShortHair kitten. We were watching Animal Planet and a show came on about different cat breeds. Saw the Oriental ShortHair and loved them. They are similar to Siamese, but come in many different colors. There is a cattery in Myrtle Beach that raises these types of cats and just had two litters.

We will most likely be getting one of the gray kittens in the first picture. We were hoping for the brown one, but think he is already taken. Kittens were born in middle of January. We can visit in middle of March and bring one home in April.

3 Dogs, 3 Cats and hopefully soon, 3 People!

No more Animal Planet allowed!

Whirlwind Ride

Last night and today have been a huge whirlwind ride for us!!!
We received some videos from our adoption agency of children that had been identified as special needs (all clients from our agency get them). We opened the videos just to see the kids not expecting to find one that we would be interested in pursuing. Wrong...one adorable little girl caught our eye, can't say too much to protect her identity, but she had very minor (if any real) special needs.
This morning we reviewed her medical and were even more surprised, some minor issues, but no major red flags. Got a little excited, but a little scared too. This was not exactly the type of child we had set out to adopt, but we were both seriously considering moving forward and put a call in to our agency to get a couple final questions answered. Of course our new I800A has not been translated and sent to Bulgaria, so we are not officially "paperwork ready" as required for these special needs referrals. Didn't know what we would have to do for that, plus needing to update paperwork to accept a child with these needs.

We found out this afternoon from our agency that another family (from a different agency and possibly different country) had seen this child's information earlier on the MOJ website, and had already requested her and their request was accepted, so she is no longer available to us. The family only had basic information published on the MOJ website - which is about 3 lines of information, no pictures, or video so there is a chance they would not move forward. But the video and pictures are what convinced us, so we are sure they will continue. We are sad for us, but happy that she has found a home.

So, we go back to waiting for our referral....and maybe paying a little closer attention to the "special needs" list of available children!

What We Got In the Mail Today

Our I800A extended approval came today! We are now approved to adopt by the US government through March 28, 2011. 15 more months...we are praying we are done well before that. The first extension request is free, but the second one is not.

We asked our agency today on the status of the referral meetings was (these are the official meetings where representatives from the Ministry of Justice in Bulgaria meet to referral available children to waiting adoptive parents). Nothing official but it looks like the last meeting was December 18, 2009. Under the new laws the committee is supposed to be meeting weekly (at least 3 times a month), but it looks like they may not be fully back to that schedule from the holidays. Also no news on the official number of children that are on the registry available for adoption, our Bulgarian team was meeting with the MOJ before the holidays to find out this exact number.

So we are approved again, and waiting!

The Perfect Outfit

Yes, we are way ahead of ourselves, but found this adorable shirt for the kiddo on eBay that would be perfect for flying home to the USA in - it even has airplanes. Of course we bought it!

Welcome to Our Adoption Blog

This is our first post to our adoption blog, even though we have been in the adoption process for 23 (yes 23) months now! To recap, we are adopting a child under age 2 at the time of referral, from Bulgaria. Our dossier was officially accepted by the Bulgarian government on March 13, 2009. At the time we were told to expect 18 months until we receive a referral of a child. Currently we have been waiting 9 months.

Once we receive a referral (we will get one picture and one page of medical information), we will travel to Bulgaria for approximately 7-10 days to meet our child and officially accept him or her. We will then come back to the US for 2-4 months. The court proceedings will happen in Bulgarian during this time. Once everything is finished, we will take our 2nd trip to Bulgaria to pick up our child and bring him/her home. The second trip should be about a week - time to get a passport, visit the US Embassy and a couple other official things.

We will try hard to update as we have any news!!!