Pre-Registration for Ukraine sent to CWA. Dossier up to bat.

It’s a month later and things have picked up quite a bit with our adoption process. Although, in the last month we did confuse some things that led us to believe we would have this process finalized in the late spring/early summer. I think the blame might have be on us for the misunderstanding. However, we’re happy to report we are still in a good spot and I’ll try to explain in this post what we believe is the correct time table to finalize our adoption.

First the good news – we have completed all of the Pre-Registration documents for the Ukraine’s State Department for Adoption and Protection of the Rights of Children (SDAPRC). This includes our home study report. Since my last update the report itself has been drafted, reviewed, revised and finalized by Adoption Circle. With much enthusiasm we are happy to announce we are officially done with that portion of the adoption. This document is what has been required along with several power of attorney forms, in order for us to successfully pre-register for the SDAPRC in Ukraine.

In order to finalize all of this however we had to get all of our documents notarized. Then, after they were all notarized, we had to get all of the notaries authenticated at the Franklin County courthouse. And once everything had been notarized and authenticated, we had to get each portion apostilled at the Secretary of State. An apostille is an international notary that has to be stapled to each document that will end up in the Ukraine making each paper official. I will say this – kudos to Lindsey for getting all of this done on her lunch breaks. We are very fortunate to live in Columbus. With her working downtown it is very convenient to get these kinds of details completed. From what I believe you can only get paperwork apostilled in the capital. I can’t imagine what we would have done if we lived hours away.

With all of the above complete, there’s still a few steps. First, all of this has to be translated into Ukrainian (or whatever language it is they speak over there). To do this, we actually sent all of the documents over to our agency at CWA. Thanks to the second half of fees that are due to our agency at this time, they will translate all of our documents into the correct language and send it to the SDAPRC themselves. Here’s all the paperwork we sent over:

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So where does this leave us? Our documents are on their way to CWA at this moment and should arrive Tuesday. Though we are not sure how long it will take to translate the documents, we’re hoping it will be soon. Once that is done and it is sent to the Ukraine we will wait patiently for the SDAPRC to assign us a specific date at which our full dossier Ukraine paperwork is due in country. We have noticed on adoption blogs that it seems that once Ukraine has our paperwork and we are “officially” pre-registered, that our registration date could be at most six months out.  But the date could be sooner, who knows. We’re not entirely sure at this point. Let’s say just for conversation’s sake, our registration date is six months out. If that’s the case, our registration date should fall around August. If say our date given was August 1st, this would mean our travel date would be 10 days to 2 months after that date. From most blogs we have read, it really has been a just a couple weeks or so after the registration date that families were informed of their court date to travel to country.

If all of the above scenarios are correct, our worst case scenario would be that we would travel to Ukraine in October. Again, that’s worst case, meaning if our registration date is six months from now, and our travel date is two months after that. There’s still definitely a possibility we will get our registration date sooner and our travel date will be within approximately 10 days instead of a couple of months, which seems to be the case for most families. October isn’t so bad.. that would be around our two year wedding anniversary. But we will be keeping our fingers crossed that things move a little quicker. On a side note, we will be sending out another copy of our home study this week to the USCIS to await final approval from the United States government. Once they receive our home study, it takes about three months to get U.S. approval. Because of how pre-registration works in the UA, this shouldn’t change our timeline.

If you would like, I ask that you pray that CWA translates our home study as fast as possible and sends them to Ukraine. If they take a month or two to translate, that’s additional months added to our worst-case scenario of traveling in October. We don’t want to push this into the end of the year!

With God’s grace, I’m hoping we can hit a home run by fall.