Mary’s Journal:

Happy Spring! It will certainly be a happy spring for us. The past couple of days have been a flurry of activity as we are preparing for Ukraine. I thought we had most everything done, but when crunch time comes, lots more things “pop” up. We have traveled overseas before, so we are somewhat familiar with packing light, travel wardrobes, etc… But now, considering we will be coming home with 2 GREAT souvenirs of our trip, well, it takes on a much deeper meaning!

For those who don’t know us, we are Jim and Mary. We have 5 great bio kids ages 20 to 13. We have decided that we want to add to our family, and decided that adopting from Ukraine is for us. We began the process last summer, (2003) by researching and starting the mountain of paperwork. And now, we are ready to go. We specifically want to adopt older children, as we have done the “baby thing’ and while it was great, it is great to be past diapers and bottles! Through email loops we found 2 children, bio sibs, who we feel would fit perfectly in our family, and we are praying that the NAC will agree with us. We are doing this independently, which basically means that other than our homestudy, no adoption agency is being used. Actually, this is the only way the Ukrainian system works-all adopters are independent. If you have an agency, they hire an independent facilitator for you once there. We decided to do the research on our own and hired that facilitator ourselves. We had some indispensable help stateside from Dr. Conaty at www.ukraineadoptionhelper.com in preparing our dossier and getting mentally ready for this trip. And now it is us, our facilitator/translator and the Ukrainian government. We will have an adventure!

Be sure to check back often, as we will do our very best to update our journals daily, with words and pictures. And pray that everything goes well.