Our Journey

Wow, I can't believe we're leaving in just a few days to meet our little one. We are both thrilled, excited and nervous about our trip and what may be in store for us. We've been on this road for about 5 years and in some ways I can hardly believe this is our life.


Now that we have a referral and our travel dates, I realize that we have been pretty laid back about this whole process. Our timeline has been pretty quick, as far as I can tell. We finished our Home Study in late September and after that we still had a few documents for our dossier to complete, then after more changes, our registration docs were finished in November. Bill says our official date of registration was December 24th, I think its earlier than this, at this point I guess it really doesn't matter.


From everything we had heard from the agency we were expecting a wait of 18 - 24 months. This is a long time but it was just part of the process. I will say I never believed that long timeline, I was convinced we'd be travelling by the end of 2008. Was I wrong.


It must have been early-March, when Bill got a call asking if we would be willing to go to Moscow City for the adoption. There would be additional costs but our agency thought it could reduce the wait by about 6 months so we said yes.


On March 20th we received an email telling us our Dossier was registered in Moscow City and on March 24th Bill received the call telling us that we had been invited to travel. On that morning Bill had called my desk multiple times. When I returned and saw this I was very worried about what might be going on. The last thing I thought he would tell me was that we had dates to travel Russia.


We would be travelling on April 13th to Moscow. All of a sudden, there was a lot to do in a short amount of time. We had to get plane reservations, updated passports (yes, mine was due to expire in May), visas, updated documents for our dossier and the list goes on. How exciting and nerve-wracking.