From the begining

Where to begin. Well I guess I'll start at the beginning. In May 2005 We began a Journey that may now come to fruition. We decided that our family was not complete. My last two pregnancies were fraught with complications; our last two kidlets were preemies and Jeremiah was in the hospital with Pneumonia for 9 days when he was born. We figured we needed to go a different way. We began looking into adoption. Being that we are both Eastern European in descent we decided to look that direction. Russia was looking good and so was Ukraine the more we investigated though, the more we found that Russia was much more expensive and required you have an agency represent you. In Ukraine, we were allowed to adopt independently. this appealed to us. Besides feeling right, Michael felt a connection to Ukraine. That decided, we then needed to find out how we do this. So we searched some more. We found Cathy Harris and Ukrainian Angles. With her guidance and support from Ukrainian Angles, we put together a dossier. I find it amazing the hoops you are made to jump through in order to adopt a child. Well we figured out the system and managed to have our dossier ready in just four short months of running around with our heads cut off. So off to Ukraine we sent our dossier for it to be translanted and to wait for it to be submitted to the NAC. A week went by and we heard from our facilitator in Ukraine. He had good news and bad. Our dossier was translated but the NAC had closed down to new dossiers due to some changes they were going to make. We were sad but had been reaaured that it would lonly be a couple of months. Well a couple of months turned into 15. In that time our paperwork became invalid due to being over a year old and the fact that we moved to a new home and state (military). We had resigned ourselves in September after the move that it was ok to move on and forget about the adoption. After all, we were a lucky family since we had three happy, healthy, wonderful boys. Well letting it go was not as easy as we thought. The boys would regularly ask when we were going to get their baby sister. How do you explain bureaucratic red tape to a five year old. We cut ourselves off from the information on Ukraine in order to move on. Donna began to look for a job now that she had 8 hours a day free, the boys were thriving in their new schools, and she need some brain stumulation. Well on December 29th she was offered a great job running an Early Childhood Education Center for the YWCA. She would start her new adventure on January 16, 2007. Unbeknownst to us though Ukaine had opened it's doors to Ameican adoptions again. On January 10, 2007 we recieved an email from Cathy Harris. Our facilitator was trying to reach us and were we still wanting to adopt for the New SDA formerly the NAC was up and running again. We talked about it a lot and finally decided that we could not just walk away; we needed to try one more time. So, while trying to figure out how to handle a full time job, three kids, and a house, we began to redo all of our paperwork for Ukraine. It was easier this time since we knew more aobut what we were doing, but harder since Donna could not dedicate as much time to it as she had in California. We contacted an agency and got our homestudy redone we had to have all new medicals, update blood tests, and a million other documents proving we were financially stable, good people, and capable of sharing our lives with anouther human being. It took anouther four months but here we are on May 18, 2007 with our dossier sent off again to Ukriane again. Now it's a waiting game; we wait to get translated; we wait to get submitted; we wait for them to accept or deny our petition to adopt. If accepted, we will be travelling to Ukraine in the near future to find our daughter and this will be our way to keep everyone up to date.