People often hear about celebrities adopting foreign children, and it seems like they swoop into a country, see a child, take them home, and that’s that…There is actually much more to the story than that, despite media portrayals. For those who have never experienced adoption firsthand, it seems like an infinite stream of papers and approvals and corrections and re-approvals. Each new document feels like a new obstacle, but it helps to understand that many of these requirements are intended to protect the children. The Homestudy(Began 30 August, completed 23 September) Any adoption, domestic or foreign, requires that a social […]

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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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