Digging out

Hip Hip Hooray - our home study visits are done! Now we are just waiting on some paperwork to come back to either us or our social worker and that will be behind us. The one surprise is that she recommended we allow her to approve us for two children, just on the off chance something unexpected - say, like a sibling - appears after we've selected our child. It's not likely, but on rare instances it does happen. We would just hate to get over there, fall in love with a particular child and not be able to take them home because we were not approved for 2. However, she IS going to state in her letter that we STRONGLY prefer one child. Let's just hope and pray we don't have to face that decision once we are there. So, I got myself organized with all the dossier paperwork - 3-ring binder w/ sheet protectors. Now I feel like we have a handle on things. Monday is our appt. with US Immigration for fingerprinting - that's a big step - the approval form we get from this fingerprinting is something we cannot let out of our sight!! We have to keep the original of it in order to travel and actually finalize the adoption. The next few months will be spent reading book after book on adoption issues, such as bonding & attachment, trust & potential in country setbacks. Last night Truman bought a couple Russian-English phrase books/cd's. The only one we memorized last night was "ya teebya lyablya" (I love you) -- yeah, I don't really know how to pronounce it either! Even though are traveling to Ukraine, the people there also speak Russian and since we cannot find Ukraine-English books, we settled for Russian. I'm sure it will get us through just fine. Have a great weekend & Happy Thanksgiving!!