Whoa

Today we got a call from our new caseworker; above are the notes we took during the call. She told us that there's a trio (!) of children, a brother and two sisters, who are going to be coming available soon for adoption. We have been asked to decide whether we wish to move forward with adopting them. The boy is 6, the sisters are 4 and 3. According to the doctor in Russia, they are healthy and "good kids", whatever that may mean. We need to think through whether we're open to adopting three instead of two like we had originally planned, but as of right now we're thinking we might do this.

If we do say that we want to move forward, we are pretty much committing to adopting all of them, provided we don't find out later on that they have more significant problems with health or behavior. Of course, we're not the only family open to adopting a sibling group, and there are a hundred other things that could prevent this from going ahead. But still.

We're excited, but we are going to pray and think about this.

One more document...

We're back to our helpful notary, since last week we missed one document that we had to get signed: Statement of Risk.

This is a four page list of everything that might not go well in our adoption process: higher costs in travel, the Russian or US government deciding to decline our request to adopt, undiagnosed illnesses or conditions in the children that we discover later on, etc., etc. It's a long list, and sobering.

At the end of the list, we make an agreement not to sue Bethany should any of them happen, since none of them are the kind of things that an adoption agency can really guarantee or do much about. I wonder if people having children born to them biologically have to sign any releases like this...

It's a good reminder of just how much we are in God's hands in this process. Many things can, and sometimes do, go wrong. We need to keep praying for wisdom and protection, always, and trust that whatever does happen, we will be given grace and strength to bear each day as it comes.

New Caseworker

Today we have been reassigned to a new caseworker, since our original (Sara) has had a baby. We will be stopping by Bethany soon with our paperwork to get it looked over before we send it off, so we'll hopefully have a chance to meet the new one. We've already done almost everything that required a lot of interaction with the caseworker, so this doesn't really affect things much.

Notarized!

Linda's smiling because we're getting our dossier documents notarized. These are the documents that are going to Russia to formally request the permission of the government to adopt children.

Next, we take them to the secretary of the state of MN to get them apostilled (kind of a super-notarization that makes them legal documents internationally).