Review and Update on Mike and Jen's Adoption

We began the adoption process May 2005 to adopt a 0-24 month-old girl from Russia and by December 24, 2005 all adoption paperwork was officially turned in to Russia and accepted. It was after a lot of prayer and pondering that we chose the adoption agency that we felt was the one to assist us in bringing our new daughter home.

Our agency is Wide Horizons For Children in Massachusettes. They are a large, well-respected agency that usually works in 9 different regions in Russia. However, they, along with all of the other agencies lost accreditation to go forward with adoptions in Russia last year. This has reduced their working regions to 2. Currently most of the other Russian adoption agencies have since received accreditation. Only about 18 agencies out of 50 have been left unaccredited. Unfortunately one of these still unacccredited agencies is Wide Horizons For Children. However, despite this setback they have still been able to complete some adoptions.

This will not be the case for us though because it would require our homestudy agency (local) to do extra work for us, which they will not do. So, WHFC has informed us that we should not expect a referral of a child until the agency receives re-accreditation. The latest news we heard is that there will be another round of re-accreditations in the Spring of 2006.

Russia has told WHFC that they are in good standing and that their re-accreditation would occur soon, but did not give an exact date. Another representative from WHFC will be traveling to Moscow to give us further news mid-February.

When WHFC was accredited the wait for a referral (a referral- for those who may not know- is when they send you a name, picture and medical record of your prospective adoptive child) was about 4 months. Then it turned into 6 months and than into 8. That is the last that I have heard.

So, if that is still holding true, we should expect a referral sometime between May-August 2006. Then we will wait another 0-3 months to travel to Russia and meet the child. After we return, we will wait another 0-6 months before we get a court date and can return to Russia to bring the child home. So, according to this timeline the earliest the adoption could take place is July 2006 and the latest that the adoption could take place is June 2007. It actually can't go longer than this because we will be moving out of Maryland in July 2007. If you move out of the home and state you currently live in you would have to start the adoption process completely over. Currently, we don't plan on attempting that.

We would really like to give a Russian orphan a "forever family". We ask for your prayers.

Labels: adoption agencies, waiting for referral