One step closer

We received our INS approval in the mail on Friday! Hooray!! We are "done" until we get the call that our daughter is ready for us to meet!

Our dossier is in Russia now being translated. Our agency says that this will take about 4 weeks or so. And then, we just wait until a child that meets our criteria is available. Russia is a blind referral country, so once our child is ready, either we will just get THE CALL and travel to see her without knowing any information about her, or we might get some basic medical information and maybe a picture. If we don't know anything about her, we will meet her in the orphanage and receive copies of her medical information. We'll send that information and pictures back here to the states for our IA doc to review and then we will make the decision on whether or not she is the one for our family. I think that we get about 4-5 days to decide. Then we will come home and wait some more while all of the paperwork gets processed and work on dossier # 2. Eventually, we will travel back for our court date and hopefully, if the court approves us, receive legal custody. Then there is a 10 day waiting period before everything is finalized, sometimes it is waived, often it is not, and then we can start the process to come home.

If we do get information, then we can have our doc review it and then decide if we want to travel to meet her.


So, we have more waiting ahead of us, but now that we have all of our paperwork in order, we can relax a bit and wait for the call!