Picture of George

Here is a current picture of George, well, current as of July. He doesn't look unhealthy or underweight in this picture. The main area that he looks or feels thin is the rear part of his back or whatever you want to call that on a cat.





I didn't get to go through older pictures this weekend. I had a longer hockey practice on Sunday than I was expecting (2 hours with lots of scrimmaging). After hockey Heather and I went with her sister, husband and kids to the new Bass Pro Shops here to see Santa arrive. We then had dinner, so by the time I got home it was a little late and I had to finish up my literature homework. Some of the real old pictures that we have of the cats are physical prints with no digital version, so I'll need to see if I can scan them in to post.

Another brief update

Yet again nothing very exciting. The agency put out a region update lately (they do this weekly). For our region, it seems that the person in the region that is in charge of referrals was on vacation and, after just coming back, has decided to stay on vacation a little longer. No referrals while they are away, so more waiting for us. still not a big deal as we were expecting to wait anyway. In a way, maybe it is good, as we know we weren't getting a referral as nobody was.

On a different subject, I wanted to get out an update on George. At his original appointments, the vet confirmed that blood test results showed an increase in waste products in the blood. These waste products are normally filtered out by the kidneys and removed from the system. If the kidneys don't function well, the waste products are not removed from the blood, hence the numbers from the blood test being higher. This is why we were giving him fluids, as his kidneys won't heal back to normal, so we need to do things to help limit these waste products.

Giving him fluids was the first step. It basically means using an IV to inject a water solution into the area beneath his skin. It sounds worse than it is, as you get some extra skin on his back and it doesn't necessarily bother them much. This helps to dilute the fluids in his system, meaning a lower level of toxins and helping his kidneys flush them out.

Wednesday I took George in for a follow-up blood test. The results show that the numbers have gotten lower, but still not to a normal level. He also lost a little weight, but this is probably due at least in part to us changing his food. Normal cat food has some things in it that we need to limit, so he gets special food. We tried dry food first (as he already ate dry food), but maybe he doesn't like it so much. I brought home a can of a different brand of similar 'diet' food and he seemed to like it better. Hopefully he will eat it and gain some weight.

We are also starting him with some pills that contain bacteria to help break down these toxins, allowing them to go out through his GI tract. This can help lower the numbers and won't hurt him. We are also trying to give him some Pepcid AC as cats with renal failure can have stomach issues.

George is doing ok with it, I just wish he could understand everything and that we need to be able to do these things for him. Please think good thoughts as we try and help George's medical situation get better. I promise to get pictures this weekend of him and our mystery cat, Lily. She is a mystery as people rarely (if ever) see her. I will try to do it tonight after soccer, but I can't promise anything.

Sorry for the long post, just wanted to get that out. Let me know about any questions or anything.

We are registered in Krasnoyarsk!

Sorry for the lack of posts but nothing much has been going on, but that is part of the process. I emailed the agency to see if we are on 'The List' yet in Krasnoyarsk, and she let me know that we are and are waiting for a referral! Yay! Keep in mind that with us requesting siblings, and not knowing who might be 'in front' of us, the wait time is not something that we can guess at. We are hoping for something quicker, but we realize that we might be waiting for some time.

On a not so happy note, we found out last week that one of our cats (George) looks to have kidney failure. Way back in April we took George and Lily to the vet to get updated shots as part of the adoption process. George was overweight so we needed to try and cut back his food to help him lose weight. He had been losing weight gradually, but we took him in for a check-up for an non-weight thing and we also realized that he seemed thinner than he should be. The gradual weight loss hid the fact that he lost lots. The vets ran some tests including blood work as George seemed ok except for the 30% or so weight loss.

Friday we get the word that it looks like kidney failure. I was worried already and then I'm told that. Fortunately, treatment and a change in diet will allow George to be fine and live a long life which is so great. I was surprised when the vet told me that we could opt for a kidney transplant or do dialysis, I didn't realize those were things done for cats. What we are doing is giving George some fluids through an IV/needle setup to get him the fluids that he needs. He has a net loss of fluids due to the kidney issue, among other things.

So, please think some good thoughts for George. I'll get some pics of both George and Lily so you can see how pretty they both are (but don't tell George I called him pretty).

We got the CIS approval today!

We got the approval, really a pre-approval, for the CIS paperwork that we sent in. It is more of a pre-approval to say that we can bring in the children, as long as other conditions are met. These conditions will surely be met, so we shouldn't have any issues with that. The next step in the immigration part is that this info is sent to Moscow for when we travel there after leaving Krasnoyarsk with the children. At that time we fill a form out to request that the children are to be made our immediate family, something along those lines.

The fingerprinting that we had actually went very smooth. The building was just off of I-64 and there weren't many people in there. We each got fingerprinted quickly and we out in about 15 minutes. The fingerprinting went much better than when we had it done at the local police station for the early paperwork. Locally, they had the familiar steps of putting the ink on your fingers and rolling them on a piece of paper. The USCIS process was computerized and your fingers were placed onto a glass scanner type of equipment. You could see the lines of the fingerprints on the monitor as the finger w as rolled around to get a good 'print'. The best part was no ink on the hands to clean off.

So, hopefully we will be registered in Krasnoyarsk soon and the countdown will really begin. Keep your fingers crossed!

Say Hello To My Lil' Friend

Ok, so Tony isn't here but I wanted to give a quick update. I had emailed the agency asking if we would be told when we were at each stage of the process. Well, one of the responses I got informed us that our dossier was on it's way to Russia!!! It will be processed/translated by the agency staff there, then sent to the agency staff in Krasnoyarsk. They will then register it with the Ministry of Education and we will get on the list, supposedly happening in 2-3 weeks. Yay!

So, now that we have a few moments of free time while waiting, I will post a few wildlife pics that I have to hold you over until we get more information.
The first pic is of my friend Tony, hence the reference to Scarface. He was sitting outside in the yard, of course far from the house. He is a black racer a little over 3' in length. Heather made fun of me because I took after my father when I got on the ground close to the snake to get this shot (not that close, though). I need to see if I can post some of his pics here, better than mine are.


Ok, now a nice friend. I have a bird feeder pole behind the house. There are several types of feeders that hang on it, along with hummingbird feeders outside the screen porch. They attract lots of birds, too many to name (but I will if you ask). Here is a shot of a pine warbler, sitting on a basic plastic feeder (not a good shot of it) that can hold various types of food. A good generic feeder (the same one stolen by the bear!).

Scheduled to get fingerprints for CIS Approval

A little late in posting this, but we recently got a letter giving us the appointment times for the fingerprinting needed for CIS approval. We weren't expecting this so soon, relatively speaking. I guess it is good to not have much in the way of timeline expectations so everything can be sooner than expected. We get our fingerprints done next week in Norfolk, although we had thought we would need to go to Alexandria for them.
Once they are done, we don't know how long the rest of the CIS process takes but hopefully not too much longer. We aren't in a rush with it as we don't need the approval letter until we are preparing for dossier #2.
Not much else other than waiting, but we will update as soon as we hear anything about the dossier progress.

Elvis has left the building!

Well, maybe not Elvis but a four pound (really) stack of papers left today for the agency. Heather sent off the dossier from work and they should arrive at the agency on Tuesday. Wow! The next step is for the staff there to make sure that all the documents are there and that we didn't screw anything up or forget something.

The dossier is then sent to Moscow so that the agency staff there can translate all of the papers. This is then sent to Krasnoyarsk to be registered with the Ministry of Education. This takes approximately 3-4 weeks. Once we are registered at the MOE they can then begin looking for a referral for us. This may take some time since we are asking for siblings, but our fingers are crossed.

Some countries allow you to be open to more than one child and you get a referral of however many children based on your choice. So, if we were open to siblings we might get a referral for a single child or siblings, whatever happened to come first. In Russia, you have to specify whether you are ready for a single child or siblings and you get that choice. We can always switch to a single child easily, but we don't want to.

We also don't know how many families that are already on the list are looking for siblings or only single children, so we don't know where we are in the line, so to speak.

The agency sends out country-specific email newsletters each month, here are some tidbits from this month's newsletter for Russia...
They have placed 45 children so far this year from Russia.
25 families are waiting for court or preparing to travel for the first trip.
18 families are waiting for referrals or considering the ones they have gotten.
38 families are preparing their dossiers or doing their homestudies.

I almost forgot about the other paperwork that Heather sent off today, the paperwork for the immigration approval. This approval is needed to bring the children into the country, allowing them to become citizens when the plane lands. We had to wait for the homestudy to be complete before applying for this approval, but it is not needed until the second dossier piece and second trip.

We now mostly wait. We can do a few things for the second dossier used for the second trip, but mostly just waiting for now. Think good thoughts while we wait, please.

Final set of docs are apostilled

I decided today that I would drive into Richmond (not very far) to hand deliver the papers that needed the apostille. I was hoping that it would be quicker if I went there in person plus it can be another part of the experience. Well, after navigating the sometimes confusing streets of Richmond I found a place to park. I finally made my way into the Patrick Henry building and up to the office for the authentications (Virginia uses the term authentication as opposed to apostille).

After I described what I needed, I was asked if I wanted to wait. I was kind of surprised, as I was expecting to come back another day to get them once they were done. I asked how long and was told "about twenty minutes". Wow! So I waited for them to be done and left after a little bit, happy that I had the docs in our hands.

This means that once we make copies of all the docs and a second set of pictures we can send off the dossier! Wow, that was quicker than we were thinking. Now, I don't know how long it will take for the agency to make sure we didn't miss anything and have the dossier translated, so I can't give a timeframe for when they will be sent to Russia. I believe that they will tell us once they send it over, though. Once it is sent over I'm not sure of how long until it is registered and we are officially on the list.

I am also going to send off the paperwork for the immigration approval for 2 children tomorrow. This is not needed until we work on the paperwork for the second part of the dossier, sent in before trip #2. For this immigration approval we will need more fingerprints taken, but this time in Alexandria.

So we almost have the dossier sent off. Hard to believe that we are at this point already.

We got the final set of docs from the agency

We were surprised today to get an envelope in the mail from the agency. It contained the last set of notarized documents we needed, along with the home studies. The next thing to do is on Monday get them to the office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth to get authenticated. Once that is done, we make copies of all of the documents for the dossier. We send in the originals and 2 sets of copies to the agency along with all of our pictures, plus we keep one set of the copies for ourselves (we later take them to Russia).

Another thing that we can do is submit the paperwork for CIS (immigration) approval to bring in children to the country. We had to wait on this as we needed a copy of the home study, but it is not needed before trip #1 so it is fine. This will take several weeks so it shouldn't be a problem.
Hopefully this batch of authentications will take no longer than the first batch.

For those that have been seeing all the news about Russia and Georgia, we have been told by our agency that this should not affect the adoption. It is in a region that is not close to ours and we shouldn't worry about it being an issue. This is good news to hear for us. We are getting close and something like that happens, not news that we wanted to hear.

A Brief Little Update

Well, nothing real different but I wanted to post a small update. We finally got our batch of documents back from the Secretary of the Commonwealth. Unfortunately the marriage certificates we got form the county were not done exactly correct, so I need to get them fixed or re-done. Not a big deal, though. We also found out that (or I had missed it in the list of docs for the dossier) that we are waiting on a few things to come back from the agency that will also need to be notarized/apostilled/copied before sending the final dossier back to the agency.

That means that the new versions of the marriage certificates can go along with the second batch of papers to get authenticated. This won't really slow us down, no worries here.

We watched a presentation from the agency about the travel portion of the process, although it did get some into the referral. There were some very interesting things to find out about cultural differences between here and Russia, along with lots of good tips on what to bring or how to act or dress. It will definitely be a case of acting like the locals when we go.

Hopefully we will get the docs from the agency soon and then we can get to the Secretary of the Commonwealth again.

One other thing that I finished up was the batch of pictures to send off. We needed pics of various rooms in the house, front/back of the house, schools, church, etc. so you can get an idea of where the children will be growing up. I put together a nice little packet with each page having 2 pictures neatly taped (with the tape hidden behind the picture, good gift wrapping trick) and captions for each. I felt like I was in school again working on a project. I was going to put on a cover page, but I felt it was enough. Now that we were delayed some I might end up putting one on, but I don't want to go overboard.

Hopefully another update soon.

Docs are off to the Secretary of the Commonwealth

We were able to get our documents notarized yesterday and also got copies of the marriage certificate quickly. I was able to send them off today to the Secretary of the Commonwealth for the apostille portion. Hopefully they can be done quickly, but I don't know how involved the process is.

We are going to work on taking pictures of the house and the community to send also. Once the documents come back from the gov we need to make 3 copies of each, then send off 2 sets of copies and the originals to the agency. Hopefully I didn't screw anything up in sending them off.
(fingers crossed)

Dossier Instructions have arrived.

Today we got an email with the instructions for both parts of the dossier. The dossier is just a collection of official documents that are translated and sent over to Russia. The exact contents vary by region, so we had to wait until we were assigned a region to begin. Part 1 of the dossier is done and sent to Russia to get us registered over there in order to get a referral. Part 2 is used for the process after trip 1.
Part 1 is mostly getting some forms notarized and apostilled, which is a fancy word for a process in which the Secretary of the Commonwealth authenticates the notary stamps. We will hopefully be able to send this to the agency very soon so that they can have it processed, translated and sent to Russia. Wow!


I want to take a brief moment to give a basic rundown of the process from here on out. Once part 1 of the dossier is sent and we are registered with the Ministry of Education, we wait for a referral. With Russia you have to specify that you are requesting a referral for a single child or siblings as opposed to either, so we put in a request for siblings. Once we get a referral and accept it, we will wait for a call about trip 1. This trip is primarily to meet the children and officially accept the referral and is about 1 week. After trip 1, we send in part 1 of the dossier and await the call for trip 2. Trip 2 is a little longer, a few weeks, and hopefully we will not have to wait very long between trips. It will be hard to have to leave someone you just met for a few weeks until you can go back.

Trip 2 will start off in Krasnoyarsk where we spend more time with the children each day, experience the city and culture, then finally go before a judge to officially be given custody. There is then a waiting period to make sure that there is no random family member of the children to take custody. We then travel to Moscow for a few days, mainly to get visa for the children to enter the US and finalize the adoption. Once we land back in the US they will become citizens.


So, it sounds a little simple with all the steps, but there are lots of little things to think about. We will have a tough time figuring out what to pack, but with trip 1 being shorter we can hopefully use that as a way to find out what we should bring for trip 2. We have found that in Krasnoyarsk there is a Subway, a California Pizza Kitchen and a Baskin Robbins within walking distance from the hotel that we will be very possibly staying in. Even if we stay somewhere else, it is nice to know that there are these and other places that we are used to seeing. It's kind of funny to think that we will be halfway around the world and about 12 times zones away and we can go into a subway.

Welcome to Krasnoyarsk!

We have been assigned the region of Krasnoyarsk for our adoption. We will soon get detailed information on what documents we need to provide for the dossier. Once we get the documents together, we send it off and it makes it's way to Russia.
Now for a little info about Krasnoyarsk ...
The region itself is a rather large area in Eastern Siberia, and the city of Krasnoyarsk is the third largest in Siberia.
Here is a map of both the city and the region within the country, along with the flag.

You can find out more information using Wikipedia (or other online sources) here.
For those who follow the NHL, Alexander Semin of the Washington Capitals was born in Krasnoyarsk. More information to come as we research our new region.

Passports have arrived!

We sent off the paperwork today (meetings at work yesterday) but we were still waiting on the passports. We needed the passport numbers and issue date for one of the forms. We also had to say that we weren't ready to continue and get a region since we didn't have the passports. Well, imagine our surprise when Heather checked the mail and the passports were there. This was certainly unexpected as we had just gone to the post office to get them done last Tuesday. The issue date was this past Monday, so they really got them taken care of quick.

When I got home I re-did the form that needed the passport info along with changing the other form to say we were ready to continue and sent them back off. I don't expect our program specialist to get them today, but they are there for whenever she checks. It makes for a good start to the weekend to know that those items are taken care of.

A quick update

Nothing really new right now, but a few minor updates. We are still waiting on the passports, but it hasn't been that long since we sent them in. Supposedly the processing time isn't too bad, so we are hoping that it goes quickly.

We got a few paperwork things to fill out and send back. Really just information stuff and to help them pick a region for us. After the region is picked we can get started on the dossier, which will contain the information that is actually sent to Russia. This will be the next big step, as it will probably take a little bit of time based on the amount of information needed, but we won't know until we find out exactly what we need to do.

The final thing is waiting on our copy of the home study so we can file for USCIS approval. This is immigration, to get approval to bring 1 or 2 children into the country. We can do this separately from the dossier information. We should get the home study info soon, though.

Cross your fingers that things continue to go smoothly and without major delays. Thanks!

We're approved!

Today we surprisingly received our official approval for the home study. We were surprised that it happened so quickly, but we certainly aren't complaining. We are going to get our passport applications done next week, and we will hear from the Russia specialist. The next step is to fill out a form to help our agency figure out a region, and then we can get region-specific information to work on the dossier.

Announcement!

For those who don't know, Heather and I have decided to adopt from Russia. We began the process a few months ago, mostly just paperwork, but wanted to wait until now to say anything just in case something changed. We're going to try to keep this updated so you can follow along. There might not be lots of posts as right now there is more waiting than doing, but we'll keep you as up-to-date as we can.
A 'brief' summary of things up to now ...

Early into the year we made a decision to look into adopting. After doing some research into the process and agencies to work with, we attended an information meeting with the agency we ended up working with. We sent in an initial form to start the process and then got the next round of paperwork in April. It was quite a bit of paperwork, so we took our time completing it and sent the packet off on June 9. The next step was to attend a mandatory pre-adoption class, which we attended June 13. After completion of the class, we waited to have a social worker assigned to us for our home study. The social worker called relatively quickly and asked if the first of two meetings could be the following day (Thursday, June 26). We happily agreed. We certainly didn't mind doing it sooner than later. We had our second and final portion of the process, which took place at our home, this Monday.

Now we wait for home study approval. Once we receive that, we will be assigned a region and getting the paperwork for the region.
Hopefully it will all go smoothly.