The Chosen Hearts

GO ILLINI!! Hope everyone had a nice Holiday and are looking forward to the New Year, I know we are. Took down all of our Christmas decorations today. That is one less thing to have to deal with in the next few weeks. I think we are pretty well set on supplies for our trip. With us not knowing who or how old he will be we are taking a few outfits in a variety of sizes for our son. So far what we have learned from other blogs and the family who traveld in Aug is that the children are wearing smaller sizes then they would normally be use to them wearing. Our sons bedroom is full of our bags with items to go into those bags piled in front of them. We will take some pictures of the room before we leave and post them on our blog. We chose to do it in a Wilderness Bear Theme that goes great with the wood walls. Have a Safe and Happy New Year!!

We would like to wish a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of our friends and family. We spent the weekend traveling to family gatherings and it was great to see everyone. Smothers was happy to see us when we picked him up. The next couple of weeks will be busy for us both with getting everything caught up at our jobs before we get ready to travel. Chris is making his Christmas Slush to take to my parents for Christmas Eve. We both would just like to say thank you to all of our friends and family for their support as we near the end of our adoption process.

We are now down to 46 days!! We have not been having very good weather here in Illinois. Then again it is Illinois. Yesterday started with rain then turned to ice and continued through the night and is still doing this as I write. Poor Smothers (our golden retriever) doesn't want to go outside because he wipes out every time he steps out the door. Other then the weather not much more to report. Still picking up items and checking off my to do list of things we need to pick up before we leave.Everyone stay safe during your Holiday travels and take care.

Time has gone quite fast since receiving our SDA appt. and with the holidays fast approaching Jan. will be here even quicker. We went to Gibson City to there Christmas Parade Celebration last night. All of the floats have to be lighted. Very neat and interesting how they made lights into everything imaginable. All of the downtown shops were open and we found a children's resale store. It was a nice store with very reasonable prices and nice things. Chris is headed off today to the Farmer City parade. He will be on a tractor for his Shriner's group. It is very CHILLY out there today. We have been introduced to a couple through e-mail that used CWA for their agency and traveled to Ukraine over this past summer. They gave us some very good information for traveling and during our stay. I liked that when I asked about shoes for the child, not knowing what size he will be, she said she traced his foot and took that to the shoe store. I would not have thought of that. With everyday t...

Today we purchased our airfare. After many hours of me going over figures on airfare for round trip, adoption fares and one ways, I decided we would purchase one ways. By doing this we will not pay for any extra charges in having to change our tickets when purchasing round trip. We will be leaving out of St Louis on Jan 24th connecting in New York before finally landing in Kiev after about a ten hour flight. We also had a 1 1/2 hour phone conversation with our case worker in which Chris only lasted about twenty minutes. She can be difficult to understand at times. She was telling us that should be fine to receive a boy but his age will probably be between 2-3 yrs old. We are going to be staying in an apartment in Kiev for the first four days and then after we are referred a child we will then travel to that region of Ukraine and stay the rest of the trip there before returning to Kiev for a night or two to fly home. Thanks again for all of your supports and comments.

We have an appointment in Ukraine set for January 28, 2008. This mean we will probably be leaving on Fri the 25th just to give us plenty of travel time. We have to allow two days for us to get over to Ukraine. We received the email from our case worker this afternoon. Still so much to do. We will first work on getting our flights. Continue to watch our blog for the latest information.

Hello Today we received an email from our case worker telling us that our dossier was registered in Ukraine on Sept 3rd. Other than that it is just wait patiently. That is all for now. Everyone take care and talk to you soon.

Hello to all We are still waiting to receive our letter from Ukraine. Our case worker said she hoped to hear from them soon. Other then getting things organized and small projects complete around our home we have not done much over the summer. It is hard to believe it is already Sept. Christmas will be here before you know it. Hope everyone has had a great holiday weekend.

Our dossier has been sent to our agency. From there if all is correct they will then send it on to Ukraine. We will keep you posted.

We finally received our marriage certificates in the mail today. We plan on going to Springfield to have our dossier documents apostilled on Monday. For now this is the only new news we have. We will keep you all posted.

Hello to all This is our first posting so give us a little time to work out all the problems. If you do not already know, we are in the process of adopting a child from Ukraine. We started our paperwork on Feb. 23rd, 2007. We are hoping to adopt a little boy between the ages of 14-24 months. As of today all of our paperwork is complete for our dossier except we are having some problems with getting our marriage license from Jamaica. They seem to be a little slow. We will post again when anything changes. Love to all