Start to our journey........

Well I began this blog when we made our decision to take another journey to add to our family......that was almost two years ago so let me start with telling that we have been registered in the Tambov Region of Russia since last fall.

We since had to re-do our dossier....oh what fun........you lose the drive and your pep after the first round and then it just seems so burdensome - I mean come on already........... with our adoption in Kaz it lasted 10 months start to finish & here we are going on two years and updating our dossier when it seemed like another adoption would never happen.

In the meantime I was my usual self finding out whatever I could and amazingly in my search I came across another blog in the same region as us that was also using the same agency as us. I was able to follow along on their long, long journey and it has been helpful. The funny part of the story is that our agency decided to connect us so that the other couple who were in process could could shed some insight on things for us. Little did they know that I had already reached out to Tamra and we had already been in touch..........we thought this to be quite funny!!

Steve & Tamra are in the midst of adopting a precious little girl named Oleysa and they are over the moon excited and anxious but the long, long wait in between meeting their daughter and court has been agonizing to say the least. Right now they are at the 5 month mark and were waiting and waiting to find out when they would have a court date.

Dennis & I received our referral on October 21st and please understand why I will not go into details just yet....as you know anything & everything can change in an instant in the world of international adoption so we are navigating cautiously until we know more.

Shortly after we received word on our referral Tamra & Steve received their court date and as the fates will have it we will be in Russia at the same time.

So we leave for Russia on Saturday November 12th & arrive in Moscow early Sunday afternoon. Sunday night around 9:00 we board a train for a 9 hour overnight trip to the region of Tambov. Nicholas is coming with us as I feel he is part of our family and we want to include him in our journey to add to our family.

As far as Nicholas goes, when we started this process we of course talked to Nicholas about having a brother or sister and he was very excited..... after a year passed and nothing was happening we decided to just not bring it up any longer since it seemed to be unfair for him not understanding this very long process. So we haven't mentioned anything to him ourselves although Nicholas has at certain times mentioned it and if he was asked about having a brother or sister by others he will simply reply not yet......more on this later.

Although our agency was supportive of our desire to have Nicholas be part of the process when we started communicating with our incountry coordinator and reminding her that Nicholas was coming along for the ride she was not as supportive...I just ignored her input and continued pressing on knowing that our stance with Nicholas coming with us was not changing. Now the hard part... we have not told Nicholas any thing about our trip yet.....we are planning to say we are taking a family trip with long airplane rides and train rides and that we are just going to be travelling for a long trip...............haah nice and easy...........the hard part will be that we prefer to meet our referral first before Nicholas - meaning keep him out of the room for a short period of time...10 minutes or so to make certain everything is in order and then bring Nicholas in to meet.....................this shoud be fun!!!