…A very good place to start. So many of you have asked how we got into this, and I think you all deserve an answer! The Discovery Last spring (March or April, 2006), we stumbled across a brief column in the local newspaper about a “culture camp” for orphans from Ukraine that would be coming to Fort Wayne in the summer. It explained a program that enabled children ages 6-12 to visit the United States for about three weeks, learn more about the US, and get the experience of living with a family. While the hope is to find “forever […]

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As I type, we are driving back home from Indianapolis, where we were officially added to “The Grid.” Today, we were fingerprinted by the Department of Homeland Security, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. In the next two to three weeks, the FBI will conduct a final background check on us, and then CIS will determine if they will approve us to bring Masha back into the country as a legal citizen. We hope to have the approval from CIS back around the end of this month; this is the last thing we need before we finalize our mountain of […]

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If everyone who gave birth to a child was required to complete the paperwork that is needed to adopt, there would be a LOT fewer children in this world. As several of you have noted (some of you quite loudly), the blog has been a bit inactive the past couple of weeks. In my defense, I have been focusing on compiling the background documentation required for the social worker and pulling together our application to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS, formerly INS, a division of Department of Homeland Security–you gotta love bureaucracy!). But I am getting ahead of […]

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