Packing is pretty crazy. Nellie has advise that yes the 900 thread count sheets would be a good idea to bring. I think she is right.

She also feels that the Charmin batheroom tissus TO GO is something no one should go to Kazakhstan with out... And I think she is right about that as well...

Here is Bill and our good friend Brian putting up the baby crib. Brian and his wife Sue gave us this crib. Thank God Brian was there, Bill and I would have never been able to put that crib together if it wasn't for him. Poor baby may had to sleep on the floor if it wasn't for him. Baby says thank you Brian.

Well I figured I would give everyone a little recap of the past couple of months leading up to today. Tho the picture doesn't show it I was close to the edge of loosing it. The paperwork chase is nothing I would ever wish on my worst enemy. ...........or maybe I would....hummmmm

Yes we have the region!

Well, we finally heard from our Coordinator that we are going to Ust- Kamengorski, Kazakhstan.

To many of you this sounds crazy. To our ears it sounds like music. That is where our baby girl is. If you look on a globe it's exactly on the other side of the world. On this map here it's the city most North/East. We are now waiting for Our LOI. Which is our Letter of Invitation to go to the country. Once we get that letter we can get our visa and then we are gone. Alla our coordinator here in the US said it will be about 2-3 weeks. So now we are trying to get everything ready to go. Stopping our mail, getting Nellie(puppy dog) over to Uncle Wally's house, getting travel insurance..... It's a crazy time.

We both feel so blessed that this is happening. I also feel that this has been and still will be the hardest thing we will ever do. But it occured to me yesterday that it should be this hard. Of course if it was easy I would think something illegal is going on with our agency.... but what I'm really trying to say is that this country is giving us, Dana and Bill Spyker this little precious life to us. And in trusting to us the future of this little girl. How amazing! This can't be taken lightly. This is important. The most important thing I will ever do. I'm sure of it. That is why I believe the process should be tough because it's that important. Nothing good ever comes easy. And boy this is SO GOOD!

So here we are. This is us. I guess I have always thought about adoption. I'm not sure why but maybe this baby of mine was always meant to be mine. When I met Bill and found out he was adopted in the back of my mind I thought, oh how perfect, what a great father he would be. Well of course we dated, got engaged, had a great wedding day and started our lives. We decided to get a dog. Nellie came into our lives and boy do we love her. If you are a dog lover then you know that truly she is our first born. We love her very much and couldn't live with out her unconditional love. And that is what she has taught us, unconditional love.

The Begining

A good question would be why would we be telling our adoption story . Who would really care? Well the reason why I want to post this is for anyone who has felt like we do. Adoption can be such a crazy time in a person life. I have read several hundred blogs about adoptions and they have help me out tremendously and I would hope I could help someone else too. Also I would love for my child to read this someday and know just how much we love um. And just how excited we are and how much work went into to the process of getting them.

So here we go, the process to get our baby girl from the country of Kazakhstan.