Could this be our future child?!

Isn't he adorable? James found this on "YouTube." This is a video of a 4 year old polish boy playing the drums and he's good! His name is Igor Falecki. When the clip is over, you can choose from 15 other clips of him playing the drums. Unbelievable! You'll need to pause the music at the bottom of this page in order to hear it.

The Process Has Begun!

The process has finally begun! We received our acceptance letter in the mail today along with a 38 page agreement (Yikes!) from our new adoption agency! We are really excited about how fast things are finally going. It took our last adoption agency 1 month to process our application and get everything sent out to us. It took this agency a week! We are pleased with the personal service SMIA (Saint Mary's International Adoptions) has given us and are really looking forward to working with them. They have such a good relationship with Poland and we are looking forward to watching this process unfold.

We have also had our first home study done and are expecting another visit soon. We really like our social worker and feel she is a God send. She is truly wanting to help us and our adoptive child (ren) get ready for this gigantic leap of faith. We really appreciate that about her. Our fears have subsided some and we hope to have the home study completed in a few weeks!

Thanks again for your continued prayers, encouragement, and support. We feel blessed to have family and friends as dedicated as you!

God's Blessings to you all and we will keep you updated as things move along!

New Agency

It is official! We have a new agency and a new country! I have to say however, this was a very hard decision to make. How does one even go about trying to decide where their child is located? It's such a monumental decision! We came to this decision through lots and lots of prayer/communication with God and secondly through lots and lots of research. Here are some reasons why we changed and why we chose the country and agency we did.

-Our previous agency called us and said that they highly recommend us changing from Kazakhstan to Russia. Kazakhstan they said was giving out blind referrals and they said they had trouble with perspective parents arriving in Kazakhstan to find their child to have some severe medical problems. Enough so that the parent has to turn down the child :( This doesn't happen everytime, but was something we would have to think about.

-Why not Russia? Our agency said that Russia was going through some changes, thus causing the waiting/referral time to go up to 2 years. They are right, Russia is going through quite a bit of changes and have closed the doors on many agencies around the country. However, the other agencies we researched showed the referral time was under a year.

-Why did we change agencies? Well, through all our research, we found that CHI's (our previous agency) waiting times were much longer then other programs. We believe they are a very good agency and we wish we could've stayed with them. But I'm not sure we could wait 2 years if we knew that there were other agencies who could move the process along faster! I'm not sure why CHI seems to be moving slower. Possibly due to an influx in applicants maybe. They are a very good a reputable agency.

-Why did we change countries to Poland? Well, hearing the information about Kazakhstan scared us and Russia seems to be really unstable, so through our research we found the Poland program! After reviewing all the information we could get on it, we decided that Poland was a good match! The country is more stable than the others (hopefully it stays that way), when you get your referrals they are filled with a lot of information on your child, the orphanages are well cared for and maintained, and we could possibly get a child under a year!

Our new agency will be called Saint Mary International Adoptions. They specialize in adoptions in Ukraine, Poland, and Bulgeria. The owner and founder of the agency is actually from Bulgeria and is said to have a good relationship with these countries. We have just sent in our application, so hopefully everything will workout. We had to reschedule our Home Study because our new agency needed contact with them before we began. However, our new agency (whom I've had contact with now for about 3 weeks) is smaller and more personable. I know we won't be lost in the shuffle. We are very confident with them and with Poland.

We're trying to be patient! Keep praying for us! I know it's working! God's Blessings to you all! We'll keep you updated!