I finally decided to start our own blog. Thinking ahead... I know a lot of our relatives and friends will want to know what is going on while we're in Ukraine a few months from now.

I've been reading blogs of other families that are currently in Ukraine and the ones already home with the kids - what an unforgettable experience they all have to go thru!

Ruslan and I have been thinking about adoption for about a year before we formally decided to start the process this March. Ruslan is originally from Odessa, Ukraine and came to US 14 years ago with his parents. I am from Minsk, Belarus - came 11 years ago with my family. We are still a young couple - Ruslan is 33 and I am 26. We've been married for almost 9 years and have been very fortunate to have met each other at our church.

We are currently waiting for our dossier to be submitted to SDA. The lady we are working with - Tatiana - is supposed to be submitting it on Monday, July 30th so we are praying that she is able to do that. We started our paperwork in March and had a completed dossier except INS approval notice by the middle of May. I sent everything off to Tatiana for translation that week and we got our INS approval notice beginning of July. I then had to FedEx her the INS approval notice and everything is currently ready to go.

Speaking the same language - Russian - will definitely help us along the way in Ukraine but we will still need help getting paperwork stuff done while we're there. I hope SDA people will be nice to us, even though we are US citizens - we are still maintaining our culture and our language. We are hoping to adopt a boy or a girl or both if they are siblings under 4 years old. We originally wanted the youngest possible but after talking to a few people - we were told that when the child is young, it's very hard to tell if they will develop and grow to be normal. Every child has different background.. so the older the child, the more obvious it is how they're developing and what problems there might be. We just pray that God sends us a child or children that is/are His true gift. I come from a family of 4 kids and cannot imagine life without children. Although we've are very happy together - I know for sure that children will bring a different level of happiness to our lives.

There is so much more I want to write.. but I'll save it for later...