I've got a Golden Ticket!

Rich has been blogging with such a great voice. I wanted to show you what the Golden (Ticket) Seal looks like. All the paperwork that we signed with our legal signature was witnessed, signed, stamped and pressed with a seal by a Notary of the Public. The State checks to make sure the person who Notarized our documents is valid, in good standing and then they certify that by affixing a golden sticker. This step is called Apostilling. It was a major part of preparing our Dossier that is on its way to Russia.

How we got here part 3

A Fresh Start

After we decided to end our relationship with the Pennsylvania agency, we looked at Russia again. We went back to Adoption Associates because we liked them when we first met them and their Russian program was back on track. Plus they're local which makes things a little easier. We went back to a few meetings and submitted our formal application. The next step was to get our I-600a form done. That form is sent to the U.S. government to petition them to let us adopt an immigrant and subsequently apply for citizenship for the child. Here's Jolynn at the post office mailing in the form.


After the I-600, we had to take some classes. One of which was a multi-cultural class. That was a two session class we took at the AA office. There weren't any tests or anything like that. It was more of a "what do you do in this situation" sort of thing. We also had to take a handful of courses online. We had started this process already with the Kaz adoption. However, these we different courses but we sort of knew what to expect. Again, not a test type of course, more situational thought provoking questions.

By the end of 2007 we had just about everything we needed to put the dossier together. The dossier is a big pile of papers that has the homestudy, pictures and information about us and a bunch of other legal certificates in it. We were ready to go.......

A Small Glitch and A Big Set Back

2008 rung in and we were getting ready to send in the dossier. At the end of January, we got our I-600 back - uh, that's not supposed to happen. What happened? They said the check wasn't included. But it was. They(the feds) put our original envelope into another envelope and returned the form. However, in our original envelope was the check! They just missed it. D'oh!

About a week after the I-600 glitch, I was fired. What? Didn't you say in part two that your boss said your job was safe? Yes I did. He lied. Now I could get on my soapbox and rant but I'm not going to. However, it will be hard for me to forgive those involved. I had never been fired before and I had no idea how to handle it. I really felt like I let Jolynn down. Faced with the uncertainty of being unemployed, the adoption was put on hold.

Jolynn had just started a new job and I spent the rest of February, March, April and most of May looking for work and doing whatever freelance jobs I could get. Finally, right before memorial day I found another job. Now some things will need to be updated on the paperwork but that's a minor issue. Could we have proceeded with things even though I was unemployed? Maybe. But it's hard to go before a judge and prove a steady income and medical benefits etc. without a job. Plus we had no idea of what our future was going to be. We may have had to move out of state. Who knows? That would have been a huge mess. So I feel very lucky to have landed where I did.

Moving On

Now that things are back to normal, we have decided to proceed with the adoption. We met with a friend of Jolynn's who is a notary to sign all the papers. Every piece of paper needs to be notarized then apostilled. Apostilling forms is the way the state verifies the notary. It's just another formal level that the documents must be at for the governments involved. Jolynn took all the papers to the state office last week to be apostilled and then we sent it all to Washington D.C.

Now we wait. There are still a few things we need to do. For example, remember the I-600 form? We sent it in again. This time it went through and now have to go downtown to the USCIS office and get finger printed for a criminal check. Not a big deal. Our dossier will be translated into Russian and then sent over. Once there, the Russian authorities will look over our information and refer us to a child.

Well that's it in a nutshell. You're all caught up. It may take awhile before we get a referral. But keep checking in. We'll be updating this blog every single step of the way to keep everyone up to date on things. We'll be posting soon........

How we got here part 2

Let me back up a bit and go back to our first few agency meetings. Also, I have to say that I'm writing these blogs from memory and because we did so many meetings and looked at so many papers, I may not remember every detail. Hopefully, Jolynn can step in with any corrections.

OK - When we first decided to adopt, we looked into both domestic and international. One of our first meetings was with Adoption Associates based here in Michigan. We looked at domestic first then international. Once we decided on international we attended some meetings at AA(not THAT AA - the other one I'm talking about here). We soon found out that many of the international programs were closed or soon to be closed. Guatemala and Vietnam were two of the big ones. However, our first choice was China. China is a very popular country for adoption because of the amount of available children and the well organized system the Chinese government has to oversee the process. However, because of it's popularity, it takes FOREVER to get through that process. And since growing our family is something Jolynn and I wanted to start sooner than later we continued to do more research. At this point Russia was looked at briefly but I think there were some technical issues between the Russian government and various agencies here in the states.

Kazakhstan and Beyond

Jolynn found an agency that had a solid program in Kazakhstan (or Kaz ). We contacted an agency based in Pennsylvania and started talking to them. We went to some orientation meetings they sponsored here in Michigan and eventually signed with them in the summer of 2007. Kaz is a very interesting country. Formally part of the U.S.S.R. it's located between Russia and China.

Kaz also became famous when the Borat movie came out. Because of it's location, the people of Kaz share both Russian and Chinese cultures as well as other Central-Asian cultures. But this isn't a 7th grade social studies lesson so let me get back on track. At the time, a Kaz adoption required 8 weeks of in country legal stuff. What? 8 weeks? Two months? Yep. Wow. Ok, well if we have to, we have to. It looked like a really cool country to visit. I have to admit, I thought it would be awesome if we traveled there in the winter that I would have a chance to ski. I wanted to check on a couple of things with my employer to make sure being gone for that long would be ok. So I had a meeting with the bigbossman and I told him what we had planned to do. "Oh, that's great", he said. "As long as the company is here, you'll have a job to come back to." I'm paraphrasing but you get the point. They even checked into the family leave act to see if adoptive fathers qualified - they do. We forged on and started preparing ourselves to put our lives here in the states on hold for two months.

The Home Study

The home study is the cornerstone of any adoption dossier. Simply put, it's a report about your life and why you would make a good parent. An easy way to describe it is an authorized invasion of privacy. They look at EVERYTHING - family history, medical history, finances etc. We decided to use Child and Parent Services. Our first meeting was in their office. We met with our social worker and she asked us a few question together. Then she asked Jolynn some questions, then she asked me some questions. Nothing too bad, mostly family history stuff and employment. For our next meeting, the social worker came out the house. It wasn't a white glove inspection but she did tour the house then we had another round of interviews. The home study also required three letters of reference from non family members. Both Jolynn and I will always be thankful for the kind words our friends said on our behalf.

The Power of the Internet

While we were preparing our paperwork we also followed the adventures of other parents already over in Kaz thanks to the world wide web. I followed a couple of families but Jolynn really watched the blogs and messages boards like a hawk. Thank God she did too. One of the biggest risks in an international adoption is the unknown element of that countries government. Kaz was changing the rules in the middle of the game so to speak. They were really making things difficult for any adoption to take place. Eventually the travel requirement went from 8 weeks to 3 separate one month trips. That along with the growing and ever changing in-country legal hurdles made us re-evaluate our situation. We felt uneasy about the way things were going so we ended our relationship with that Pennsylvania agency. Recently, we found out that agency has gone out of business. I can't imagine what those parents are going through now.

In Part 3 we have a fresh start - almost.

Wow - we're paper pregnant! And how we got here part 1

Jolynn went to the agency today and submitted our dossier papers. So we're now "paper pregnant" as they say in the adoption world. Pretty cool, eh? As I sit here and write this, it still hasn't sunk in yet. But hopefully soon we'll be parents. It doesn't seem like three years have passed since we visited the first fertility doctor. There I was, in that special little room reading the May 2005 edition of playboy. Wait a minute - reading? Uh, I was there for like "another reason." But it is true, men do read the articles. It was the baseball preview edition.
In 2006 we switched to another fertility specialist and attempted many IUI's. We even started injecting Jolynn with all sorts of drugs which didn't help with the pregnancy but they did do a great job of messing with her hormones. It wasn't long before she became one of the zombie's from evil dead. Here's a pic from '06.
Of course, I'm joking. Looking back, I'm trying to make light of what was a very stressful situation for both us. Those fertility drugs are very powerful and having to inject my wife with them is something I never thought I would be doing.

After the IUI attempts, we sat down with the doctor and decided that adoption would be the best way to grow our family. So we began researching different agencies and the pros and cons of both domestic and international adoption. We went to alot of meetings and met alot of adoptive parents. We finally decided to adopt a child internationally which opened a new set of possibilities to research.

In part two we'll look into the whacky world of international adoption!

Our First Blog

So as some of you know and some of you may not know, Jolynn and I are adopting a child from Russia. We'll be working on this blog from time to time to keep our family and friends up to date on the process. There's also plenty of back story to explain how we got to this point - but we'll get to that later. For now, we're sitting here on "dossier eve" (we're submitting our dossier to the agency tomorrow) and we wanted to pass along this poem which kind of sums up our feelings. Stay tuned.......

Not flesh of my flesh,
Nor bone of my bone,
But still miraculously my own,
And don't forget for a single minute,
You didn't grow under my heart but in it.
© Fleur Conkling Heylinger