Update on Our Adoption

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

We hope you had a very Merry Christmas! We did! We visited my family for a week! (We had "Christmas" with Andrew's family over Thanksgiving!)

Update on Our Adoption: Where We Are Right Now

Right now, we are still in the paperwork stages of our adoption. During December we finished up our part of the remaining paperwork needed before we meet with our social worker for homestudy interviews. We are hoping to have our homestudy interviews in January, but our agency is still waiting to receive Katie's BCI (background check) results. Once our homestudy interviews are completed, our social worker will write a report recommending us as adoptive parents. We should receive the report a few weeks after our last interview.

What's Next?

The next step after a homestudy is applying for immigration approval from the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services). Immigration approval can take several months to receive.

Following immigration approval, all of our documentation (birth certificates, marriage license, medical exams, FBI background checks, homestudy reports, immigration approval, etc.) will be translated into Bulgarian and sent to Bulgaria for approval by the Minister of Justice. We hope to have our paperwork ready for translation by April so it can be registered with the Bulgarian Minister of Justice this summer.

Once we receive approval from the Bulgarian Minister of  Justice, we will wait approximately 6 to 18 months to be matched with children who would be a good fit for our family. When we receive a referral for children, we will fly to Bulgaria to meet them and officially accept their referral for adoption. We will then return home for 4 to 6 months while more paperwork is processed. Then we will fly to Bulgaria to complete the adoption and bring our children home!

When Will Your Adoption be Completed?

2014 or 2015. Not to be vague, but there are so many variables. A lot depends on how fast the US and Bulgarian governments process our paperwork, and on how long we have to wait for a match with children. The earliest we expect to bring our children home is a year and a half from now. More likely it will be 2 to 3 years until everything is finalized and we can bring our children home.