Our story....part 4

The paper chase is not what I would call a fun time. 

First comes the homestudy.  Nothing painful.  Nothing difficult.  Just time consuming.

The homestudy took us four months roughly.  The worse part of all was the classes that we had to take.  So we thought at the time.  Turns out that if we had paid a little closer attention, we would have been a little more prepared for what was coming.  Oops.

Homestudy complete, we started in on the dossier.  We completed that and handed it in by early December.

Sometime the end of December beginning of January, the agency that now had all of our paperwork lost their accreditation for Russia due to an abuse case involving one of their clients. 

We had to search for a while to find an agency who would accept us.  Most agencies require that both spouses be 25 years old.  I was only 22. 

Agency found, we sent in our application, were accepted, and started to redo our paperwork.

All went well.  Kind of.  The new agency required documents be completed a little differently than the first agency did.  Our social worker wasn't willing to change them.  Not without a fuss.

We would ask her to do something just a little differently.  She would bring us the document completed exactly as it had been before.  We would ask her to re-do it.  She would retort that she has never had to do it that way before and she doesn't plan on starting now.  We would beg our agency to simply accept it as it was.  They would refuse.  We would call our social worker with the verdict.  She would huff and puff and finally do it correctly. 

It got bad though.  The last time I ever spoke with her...other than my apology phone call afterwards...she informed me that such picky people on simple documents could never be good parents.  She was hanging up that phone and calling the state to report us as 'unfit to be parents'.  I burst into tears and hung up.  Then called her back to apologize for hanging up on her. 

I called our agency.  They dealt with our social worker from then on.

Not too many months after, all our homestudy stuff was transferred to our placing agency.  It has never left the confines of their office.  We love working with them.

Paperwork done again, we started the 'short' wait to get a referral.  Six months or so later, Russia shut down for several months due to an abuse case in the states.

This stack is all our 'expired' dossier documents....one of the times.  The whole stack actually filled a banana box at the end of the three years.  :)

Several months after that...after waiting for quite some time for our children to enter our lives....we had a meeting with our agency to find out that the money we had paid up front had all been 'lost'.  I can't say too much about that, but about forty agencies in the states (and who knows how many families) were affected by the fellow who took our thousands and ran.  At that time, all our fees were due right up front.  Now?  Our fees are due throughout the entire process. 

Our agency definitely treated us right through the whole mess.  It wasn't their fault.  They had nothing to do with the problem.  But still.  They paid roughly half of the fees that we now had to re-pay when the time came.

It was a rough time.  This adoption stuff is costly enough without having to re-pay what you've already paid. 

We just about quit.  We were one step away from saying that it just wasn't worth it.  The whole process had been just one over-sized headache from the get-go. 

We prayed.  And prayed.  And against our will, decided to continue with the process.

By then, all our documents had expired.  The entire dossier had to be re-done.  We knew everyone in government offices in our little town on a first name basis.  Our doctors got really tired of seeing our faces (every three months).  Our police department wearied of seeing us be buzzed through the door (every three months).  The post office people thought we should likely own part of it due to the overnight fees that we were racking up.

How fun.

Finally.  December 5, 2007 we received a picture on our e-mail of a little boy dressed in pink trimmed overalls.  The wait was finally over.  Kind of.  We were ecstatic.  And we knew that God was holding our process up just so we could become the parents of the sweet little guy in the pictures.  After all.  Just a year before?  When our money had been 'lost'?  This little guy had just entered the world as a screaming baby.  I assume.  I wasn't there to hear the screams.

  

What we didn't know was when we could go meet him....cause we still had to wait a while on our second child. 

 Whom we expected to be a boy....but ended up being a girl!

P.S.  Please note.  Not all adoption journeys are this long.  Not all adoption journeys are so event-filled.  As you'll see in coming 'parts'....our current process has only been 10 months long to date...and we've already met little Jack Nickolay (only seven months after starting the process).   We went into it this time expecting the worst.  Only God knows the time line.  All we can do is trust.