Just Skyped

We just skyped with Sergei- arranged it with Larisa, the counselor from his school and she took him to her home to make it happen. She is truly an angel and we can't wait to meet her when we arrive in Severodonetsk. Sergei is heading out to a summer camp by the sea for three weeks, so he won't arrive back until 6/21 which should be about the time we land in the Ukraine. We start off in Kyiv and then have an overnight train ride to Severodonetsk. If we get there earlier in June, we can still begin some of the legal stuff before he gets back to school. We hope to get the date locked in next week.

With the power of the Internet--here is a photo from Skyping today!

The Dossier Is In....

After Dana traveled to Harrisburg, convinced the State Police that they actually could hand over our criminal background checks over the counter (they had said earlier that they had to be mailed to us at home), convinced the staff at the Department of State that our certified marriage license was as valid as an exemplified marriage license (who knew there was a difference?) she Fed-Ex'd all 40 documents over to Kiev to our contact there. They have all been translated and were presented to the Ukrainian government on Monday. We should get our first appointment notification by June 1 and those are usually scheduled about two weeks out, so we are looking at less than a month to be on our way!

Piecing It All Together

It looks like our travel date to the Ukraine to reunite with Sergei and finalize the adoption will be about June 22.

Many of our friends and family have been asking how they might help. This adventure was not something that we'd been planning to do and there are a good amount of expenses related directly to the adoption, as well as extras such as lodging and meals in Ukraine for a month, translation costs for documents, open-ended air travel, and a monetary gift to the orphanage where Sergei has lived for the past eight years.

We found a great example through an adoption resource about building a puzzle of support for the child that accomplishes some grassroots fundraising, as well as show Sergei all of the people who supported his adoption and transition to our family.

We have a 500 piece puzzle ready to roll. With each gift or contribution to support Sergei's adoption, we'll write your name on the puzzle piece and then build the puzzle for Sergei's arrival to show the foundation of support he has in the US as well as support us in this journey.

So, if you are interested in being a "piece of the puzzle", let us know!

Thanks in advance for your kind support!

Craig and Dana

The Background

You're likely reading this because we sent you a link to tell you about our upcoming adventures. In 2009, Craig and Dana both turned 50, Pat (18) and Evan (16) are developing into great young men, and we see the light at the end of tunnel JUST AHEAD!

In September, we received an email from New Horizons For Children (http://www.newhorizonsforchildren.org/) asking if we wanted to host a child from an orphanage from Eastern Europe over the Christmas holidays. We've sponsored a child through World Vision so we can only assume that our name crossed over from that list to New Horizons. Craig forwarded the email to Dana and said...."what do you think???"...and we then began a weekend long conversation about whether this was the right thing to do. We all looked at the website as a family, saw 180 kids who were slated to come to the US but still needed host families, looked again individually, told ourselves that this was a heck of a commitment and maybe it wasn't the right time, told ourselves that we should do it, etc. Sunday was Pat's birthday and we went out to lunch and it all seemed to come together that this would be a good way to strengthen our role as a family and put our faith into action.

We were close to the deadline- talked to John Devine, an awesome volunteer from New Horizons, and figured out that hosting a teenage boy would be the best thing for us since we sort of had the teenage boy thing down at our house. Craig looked at the New Horizons website and picked out six boys that he thought might be a match for us; Dana picked out six too on her own. Amazingly, three were the same. Out of those three, Pat and Evan looked and said....let's go with this guy...Sergei a 14 year old from Ukraine. The coolest thing about Sergei that we liked from his profile was that although he had been in an orphanage for eight years, he had a great sense of humor and was able to make the most of his circumstances. Humor is a big thing in our house...this kid is going to be fun!

We got all of our background check stuff together- criminal checks, FBI fingerprints, references from friends and family, minister approval, etc, anticipating the arrival date of 12/12 to JFK in New York.

December 12 arrived- we headed to JFK with signs and balloons, and along with many other host families, waited for the kids coming to the East Coast to arrive from Kyiv. Sergei had found out about the trip just a week before and never been out of the Lugansk region in the Ukraine in his life. He got information about us just when he arrived at the airport so he had about 24 hours notice about exactly who his host family would be.

We were looking to the left, and Sergei arrived to the right with our photo in his hand and we didn't even see him approach...he yanked on Craig's jacket and pointed to our photo...yes that was us and it was the beginning of our adventure with him!

There are loads of details over the next five weeks that we would love to share but won't take up all the space here. It was a great experience for us as a family and our boys commented that it was amazing how you could communicate without a whole lot of shared language. As we approached the end of our hosting experience, we knew that we had made a connection that we wanted to continue. Over the next month, we talked about it, thought about it, prayed about it, missed Sergei and then started the official application process without a real sense of how it all would time out. We moved along- got the homestudy completed, got re-fingerprinted, criminal checked again, had about 40 documents notarized and apostilled (that's your vocabulary word to look up) to prove that we were ok to adopt and were approved by the US Govt. (also known as "notice of favorable determination") at the end of April. Our documents will arrive in Kyiv next week.

We send special thanks to the staff of our Congressman, Joe Pitts, who helped us navigate what was expected to be a 10 week delay in processing the final approval with USCIS and reduced that time to about three weeks.

At this point, we are in ready mode to travel to Ukraine anywhere from mid-June after celebrating Pat's graduation from high school on June 10. Craig and Dana will travel together; Craig will stay for about the first two weeks and the first court hearing; Dana will stay for about another two weeks for the final hearing and processing through Kyiv and then head back to the US with Sergei.

Whew- that's a lot and hopefully catches all of you up. We'll use this blog to keep you updated!