Appointment date!

Great news! On Thanksgiving Day, yesterday, we heard from our facilitator, and our official appointment date is January 25. So we will have some time to get into a groove after the holidays before heading to Ukraine. He says the SDA is closed for the first half of January as well as late December, so we expect there to be a large number of children becoming available for international adoption (after their one-year waiting period) during that time when no one is coming to adopt. Of course, God does not need to play the odds, and at the end of the day there will be only one right sibling group regardless of how many are available.

Expecting answer anytime

Thanksgiving Day is supposedly the last day that the SDA has to give us a response to our dossier submission. Obviously, we are expecting that we will be approved. I talked last week to our facilitator; he confirmed that the dossier was submitted without a problem, and he says there is a chance that we could get an appointment before Christmas, even though we still are expecting it in early January. A December appointment would be inconvenient, since I will be on a business trip until the 16th (2.5 weeks in Edmonton will be a great way to toughen up for winter in Ukraine!), and it is unlikely that we would be able to do very much after the initial appointment if it happens close to Christmas. I'm sure God's got it figured out one way or the other, though. We'll post as soon as we have an appointment date.

Fourth Dossier in Ukraine

We had thought that it would be a matter of 2 or 3 weeks in September to quickly renotarize some papers and solicit a couple of others and we could send this dossier to Ukraine, but we were very wrong. There were delays at a couple of points, and even though we tried hard to quickly keep things moving whenever the ball was in our court, we ended up running out of time to do things the easy way. The final straw was when a bunch of papers got returned to us by the Secretary of State because the notary had signed her name correctly (with a middle initial) on only a couple of documents but not most of them. That makes three different notary errors that documents have been returned for.

We didn't have enough time at that point to confidently do everything by UPS, so I drove down to Indy, and that was when I took a turn to goof up: I had driven down on Election Day, and even though the bank was open to notarize our documents, the government was not. So Julie and I drove down together the next day and breezed through the government building and the DHL shop. The dossier looked pretty good, all clean and notarized and authenticated. DHL actually got the package to its destination in Ukraine in less than 48 hours, although there was no one to sign for it until the next day, Saturday; there's some efficiency!

So we are now waiting to hear from the facilitator if everything got submitted OK yesterday, Thursday, Nov 11. We will post as soon as we have news on that.