Translation Please!

No, Tim and I haven't mastered the Russian language... but... drum roll please... we did FINISH OUR DOSSIER! That's right, folks, we are officially "in translation." It feels like a real milestone in our adoption journey and, boy, did it take a lot of effort to get here. Today was a gueling day of paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork. First, we corrected the one glitch in our notarized document... a fact for which we owe Marty a big honorable mention! (Thanks, Marty, you're the best.) Then we headed off to state capital to have everything apostilled by the secretary of state. We sorted and stapled. We gathered all my carefully organized paperwork into several very confusing piles. We re-sorted them and handed them over. And we held our breath. Tim and Calvin hit the train musuem while I waited (yes, I'll admit, I couldn't bear to leave my precious dossier), then forty-five minutes and one large check later, we had pretty gold stickers on all of our paperwork. Calvin found this part very interested and I was momentarily terrified that he would affix tigger stickers to all our documents. When we got home I headed over to Kinkos and burnt through over 500 copies to make our five complete dossier sets. Then I sent them off to the great unknown to be translated into Russian and sent to Kazakhstan.
We were told that we would be approximately 2 months in translation. Translation time depends on what kind of child you are requesting and since we want a child under one year old, we are in for the longer end of the translation spectrum.
The crazy thing for me is that, from here on out, we have done everything we can to bring our little one home. We have rushed around, bothering the people we love for recommendations and last minute babysitting gigs. We have notarized, apostilled, photocopied, and faxed, and fed-ex'd. But that's all come to an end. Until the moment we accept our invitation to travel, we are done and all we can do is wait.
Wish us luck. We are terrible at waiting.
Love to you all.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

I'd like to say a special thank you to all the hard working people at the good ole' Department of Homeland Security. That's right everyone, our I-171H is here! Hurray!
'What?' you say....
Keep up, people. It's the last piece of our dossier paperwork. It wasn't supposed to arrive for another month...but it's here! Yea!
So now, I've just got to finish up my notarizations (sorry, Marty), double check with WPA that we did everying right, and head over to the Secretary of State's office to get those pretty gold seals on everything. Fingers crossed I'll get it all done by early next week!
That's the update, my friends. I'm going to go back to dancing around the kitchen now.
Paka Paka.

ya nye go-vo-RYOO pah ROO-ski

That's right. I don't speak Russian... but I'd like to!

Becca's Little Birthday Present

Tim just found this article on how Kazakhstan will be celebrating my birthday. According to Chinanews, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev will run a 250m stretch of the torch relay after the Beijing Olympic flame arrives in Almaty, Kazakhstan on April 2, 2008. Neat, huh.

Why the Rush?

So looking at the timeline we've created, some of you might wonder... what's the hurry? Well, besides the obvious reason that we want to get our child home as soon as possible, there is another. That reason has everything to do with notarization and our friends at the Kazakhstani Embassy in New York. Here's the lowdown. We've got to get our dossier (paperwork) to the Kazakhstani Embassy before any one of the documents in the package is more than 6 months old. This doesn't sound too hard, until you start to understand all the hoops that have to be jumped through. For example, one of the documents in our dossier is a form called an 1-171H, which we receive from the USCIS ( the united states department of citizenship and immigration services). We can't get this document until we have a completed I-600A from the same agency. Currently the wait time to have your I-600A processed is running right around three months, BUT the USCIS can't even start processing our I-600A until we have a completed, approved homestudy report submitted to them. However, we can't finish our homestudy until we have documents like medical evaluations and income verifications completed, each of which is notarized. So, since we have started getting documents notarized, we are now in a mad rush to try to get our homestudy done, so that we can get our I-600A done, so that we can get our 1-171H done, so that we can have our dossier translated into Russian and submitted to the Kazakhstani Embassy before the notarization we just got expires and needs to be redone! Whew. And now you know.

Why Adopt?

Many of you will be surprised to know that Tim and I have talked about adopting since we started dating in college. To us, this isn't a "second best" option. It's different - but just as beautiful, natural, and exciting as having a baby biologically. We didn't expect to adopt so soon, but the more we thought about it, the more we realized that the timing was right and that we should seize this amazing opportunity before it passed us by... that is, before we chickened out. Yeah, adopting is scary, but so is childbirth! Loving anyone is a risky proposition. I guess it just comes down to the fact that adopting feels so much more natural to us than going "high tech" with fertility procedures. In fact, I can honestly say that we feel grateful for the struggles of the past because it has led us to this amazing journey to find our next child, a child who's arrival we are anticipating with the same joy that brought Calvin into our lives.

Welcome!

It's official. Our happy little family of three will be growing. The Snyders are adopting from Kazakstan! Wow. Tim and I will be parents again and Calvin is finally going to be a big brother!We are so excited to be starting what will undoubtedly be an amazing journey to bring our child home and we are so glad that through this blog all our friends and family can come along for the ride. Welcome! I'll be updating this blog whenever we take a new step in our adoption. There probably won't be much to say in the beginning, but this site will be a great way for us to connect with all of you when we are living in Kazakhstan (gulp) for the two months it will take to meet our child and finalize the adoption. When that happens, we'll post as many pictures as we can, so that you all can get to know the newest Snyder before he or she comes home. Wish us luck, guys, and we'l keep you posted.
Love to you all,
Becca