I am adopting! I started the process to adopt from an Eastern European country (referred to as Landia in this blog) this summer. I was told that my homestudy would be finalized today, which is what I was waiting for the news to no longer be a somewhat secret.
I have known since I was a child that I would adopt one day from a former Soviet country and it is crazy to think that I am very close to making that dream happen. I have had quite a few people ask me why now and my answer is usually something along the lines of why not now. Basically I know that I am still on the younger side and single, but I have the space, I have a stable good income, and I have a fantastic support system. The later three are much more important to me than the first two in order to start this process. I also don't like deferring dreams for things that aren't mandatory.
From here the timeline is vague, but as soon as I have my finalized homestudy in hand, I get to ship it out to get approval from USCIS to adopt. This approval takes about 8 weeks. Then I ship that approval and a whole bunch of other paperwork (in triplicate) to Landia for translation and submission. That process takes a month. After that a referral could come immediately or six months later or really anytime. I have approximately a month between accepting the referral and my first trip to Landia. That trip will take about a month and I will possibly bring the child(ren) back to the US to be hosted with me until the adoption is finalized on the third trip, which happens 5-6 months after the first trip. The second trip is a quick trip for a court hearing that in this case the child(ren) do not need to attend. And of course throughout the whole process there is a lot of paperwork :)
I will cover why the country that I chose and put up a page on the timeline up to this point later, but I have places to be and paperwork to fill out.
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