Shortly after we returned from KZ in August 2007, we got a call from our agency...could we travel back to Kazakhstan as soon as possible to adopt the boys? Huh??? What happened to the problems in the boys' file?? But OK, sure, we aren't ones to look a gift horse in the mouth so we said we'd move Heaven and Earth to make it happened. We updated paperwork and figured out childcare for our kids who couldn't miss school...and we waited to hear we could travel. We waited through the fall of '07...and the winter of '08...and then the spring of '08 was over and summer arrived. We encountered one problem and delay after another...we began to wonder if we would ever get the approval we so desperately wanted. We even started to wonder when we should throw in the towel.
Each time we got close to the elusive LOI (letter of invitation to travel to KZ to adopt), something went wrong and the goal seemed to move further away. We agonized over our decision...were we being fair to our kids at home or to the boys we had offered hope to in KZ? We took what we hoped would be our first family portrait in KZ...but would we be able to translate our dreams into reality? As we updated our court documents only to watch them expire again and again, we wondered how long we could remain in limbo.
We wrote letters to the boys in KZ, sending pictures of our home and our activities; we never received a letter back but we kept sending the letters anyway. It's been almost a year since we visited the boys in KZ (and many more months than that since we began the adoption process); they celebrated another birthday and completed another year of school. We told them we would try our best to return for them by the spring of 2008 but they are still waiting. If the wait is hard for us, what is it like for them?
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