Adoption: From Guest Blogger, Penny G.

We began the process of adopting in August so we're 4 months into it, which isn't very long. It feels longer though. Our homestudy took longer than I expected. We had to wait to complete it until we could move forward with the rest of the paperwork. A couple of weeks ago we finished the homestudy and sent that in with some other paperwork to Immigration Services. It was sent back because they raised the fee and we didn't know it. We re-sent it on the 9th and expected a couple of weeks to go by before we were notified of when our fingerprint appointment would be. It came this past Thursday and our appointment is next Thursday! Once that is done we will await forms to be sent to us from the Department of Homeland Security to go into our dossier, which is basically our lives on paperwork. We have a few more papers to fill out and get notarized and then we will send everything to Tallahasee to get apostilled, which is baisically a notary of a notary. We will then send all of that to our adoption agency and they will send it to Russia where they will translate everything into Russian. This is when the real waiting begins as we are put into the Russian adoption system. It will probably be about 18 months before we get pictures of our children and about 6months after that until they are legally ours. We're praying that it won't be that long. Thankfully God is in control of everything and everything will happen is His perfect timing.