Paper Pregnancy

Well Teresa has been acting kind of strange the last few days. Using my superb male logic I figured it out. We are pregnant. No not that kind everyone please calm down. In adoption we've learned the term paper pregnancy, anyway I decided that we were and that was the problem.

Sooooo a couple of nights ago when she went to bed I ran down to the kitchen and prepared.....


yes a bowl of ice cream with some dill pickles on top.

At least she was smiling and laughing. No she didn't take a bite, said it looked and smelled gross.

Talk with our employers

All went well in our talks with our employers. I celebrated with donuts, hopefully slightly more healthful than cigars. Okay I've always loved donuts.

Teresa had her talk with her bosses and they are supportative.

You may notice that we have been very careful not to give out too much personal information. That is intentional. If you have interest in more detailed discussions please email us. We are not trying to exclude our friends and family, we just don't want to give too much information out on the web or that can be picked up by the robotic crawlers that search websites.

We have our Appointment! YES!!!

Well after nearly 2 1/2 years we have an invitation. We will be at the Ukraine State Department for Adoption (SDA) on November 20 at 10 AM.

Does this mean we really have much more information? No. Ukraine handles adoptions differently than most other countries. At our appointment we will be interviewed and then shown pictures of kids who are close to our request in the dossier.

The SDA will then give us a letter of invitation to an orphanage and we will travel to meet the kids. You do not get to look at all the kids at the orphanage only those you pre-selected at the SDA. After meeting with the kids, the orphanage director, and reading the kids files at the orphanage we will need to make a decision as to whether we want to adopt the kids.

I can't picture Teresa doing anything other than holding them and claiming them forever.

Then we will schedule a date with the court. That usually takes another 7-10 days. At court we hope to be named the kids parents. Usually there is a 10 day waiting period at this time to allow for an appeal. At the end of the waiting period we will be the kids legal parents. At that point it usually takes another 10 days to get the kids new birth certificates and their US embassy appoved medical physical checkup and their Ukrainian and American Visa and Passport.

Many families have been able to give their Facilitator/Translator power of attorney to carry documents around during this time. We may also fly home and catch up on some of our work during the two waiting periods.

Every family seems to have had a different schedule and there are no guarantees but, from November 20, the most common time frame seems to be about 6-7 weeks until we will have the kids home.

It looks like Teresa will miss out on the coldest part of winter and those squat pit toilets she was so looking forward to.

Why Ukraine

I'm not going to copy everything from a prior blog but here are a couple of sections that might fill in some gaps.

The Journey So Far

I really should have started this blog at the beginning but thought at the time that the interesting part would be our actual travel time. As many of you know the paper chase part of adoption and the wait time probably have more twists and turns than the travel time. At least that is what we hope.


We have been married for nearly ten years and were pregnant for a few short weeks three years ago before losing a baby. Teresa's doctor was extra rude and said we were getting too old for that.


In March of 2006 we decided to try adoption. Both of us love kids and have been involved with children's activities at church for years. We were listening to our local christian radio station and there was a group putting on an adoption seminar at one of the churches in the Denver area.


We liked much of what we heard at the seminar. The organization was really pushing adoptions from China but also worked in a few other countries. We decided that we wanted to adopt more than one child and that we would like to adopt siblings with at least one boy and one girl. At that point it became clear that China would not be an option as nearly 98% of all children being adopted from China are girls.


Just as we felt that we had a good start on the process Ukraine decided to shut down international adoptions while they reorganized the various cabinet ministries for the new government. This was in 2006 and they remained closed for eight months. The adoption agency that was handling the international part of things called our home about six weeks after the US embassy had emailed us to let us know this was going on. I would recommend that PAP (prospective adoptive parents) sign up for the embassy's email to PAP. http://kyiv.usembassy.gov/amcit_adoptions_eng.html


Out of the countries that our original agency worked in we chose to start working toward adopting kids from Ukraine. Ukraine is a country in eastern europe that used to be part of the Soviet Union. It lies between Russia to the east and Belarus and Poland to the north and Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova to the west. It also has a large southern coast on the Black Sea.


Ukraine still had communist leaders until the Orange Revolution in December of 2004. So it's journey toward democracy started much later than many other eastern European countries.


Part of the reason I liked the idea of adopting from Ukraine is that my family on both sides comes from the midwestern US, Nebraska and Illinois. Ukraine is known as the breadbasket of eastern europe and that seemed comfortably familiar.

New Friends

We believe that God does bring the right people into our lives at the right time. The last couple of weeks have been like that. A team arrived at my (Jim's) office to complete a financial audit. One of the auditors was working a similar job in Moscow four years ago. They decided to adopt and found it easier to adopt from Ukraine instead of Russia. They adopted three boys and gave lots of good advice. One of the things that we had not given any thought to was the fact that multiple kids from the same family often end up in different orphanages. This may require seperate court cases for each of the kids.

During the second week of the audit we had an additional auditor who grew up in Moldova, a country that borders Ukraine and also was part of the former Soviet Union. He tipped us off to a great web site for online videos in Russian. Here's a couple of our favorite sites: http://etvnet.ca/ and http://www.wwitv.com/.

Teresa continues to collect alot of things for the trip. I'll supply a picture soon. I keep repeating a couple of lines we've learned from other blogs. "When packing less is more" and "Remember you are going to take your children to America, not taking America to your kids" I don't think she hears me. She just bought one of those hand held things that you can weigh your luggage with.

If you have advice for things to take on an international trip we'd love to hear from you.

Dossier Submitted

Well after nearly two years of working and waiting we have updated all of our dossier documents and it has been submitted and accepted. We have a registration number and should hear about our appointment date within four weeks.