Navigating Life's Paths

First, let me start this post by saying CONGRATULATIONS to Alex! He passed his road test today. I'll follow that with I'M SORRY to the residents of Atlanta.... there is another teenager on the road. :-) Seriously though, he is a great driver. The rule is that he is to text/call before he leaves somewhere and text/call as soon as he gets to his destination. If he doesn't, he looses his license forever. Not really, but it's a good threat.

Okay... onto the real topic of my post. Navigating Life's Paths.

I truly believe that every path you go down in life happens for a reason. Some paths are long and winding and at times you feel like you may have made a wrong turn or are going in circles. Some are straight up hill and you’re afraid you might not make it because you’re so out of shape. On the opposite end of the spectrum, sometimes you feel like you’re headed straight down hill and can’t slow yourself down. Regardless of the type of path, you always wind up where you are meant to be.

As all of you know, we started down our “path” of adoption in March of 2007. It started out being a straight, well maintained path. We gathered documents like crazy people, apostilled to our hearts content and finally in July 2007 our dossier went off to Moscow. Then our path got a bit windy. We couldn’t see around each corner and didn’t know what was next which was hard for a type “A” personality such as myself! At first, we thought our little Peanut was in Krasnoyarsk. In December, we took a sharp left and headed back west towards Izhevsk and now we’re making another change! I’m telling you, I’m getting GOOD experience chasing a toddler. Unfortunately, this toddler seems to be running ALL over Russia!

After many long, long, long (did I mention long) conversations at home (mostly in the hot tub with a glass of wine), we finally decided that it was time for us to change agencies. It wasn’t an easy decision, but it felt like the right one. Over the past few weeks we have been filling out our application, making sure all of our ducks where in a row and making sure we could afford the switch as we knew we wouldn’t be getting any money back.

Yesterday, I officially withdrew our application/dossier (whatever you want to call it) from CHI. I was a bundle of nerves but once it was done, I felt a nice sense of calm. I felt like we were finally back on the path that would ultimately enable us to complete our adoption. We knew that we could get a referral from CHI at any minute since we were #3 in line and we had to decide if the risk was worth it and in the end, we decided that even if it took longer, we felt it was what we were supposed to do.

I’m not going to go through why we decided to leave, etc…I’m happy to say that we left CHI on a good note, provided the agency with feedback and received well wishes from the people we have been working with over the past 11 months. It also means that those families waiting at CHI will move up a spot – so it’s good for many people!

On to the new agency! We are hoping to submit all of our dossier documents next week and be well on our way to a referral! It’s amazing how quickly a second dossier can come together. The only things left to do are FBI clearances, medicals (scheduled for 2/18) and we’re waiting on some updated home study documents! The good news is that we went back down to our original age range of less than 24 months.

So, back to this path we’ve been on…. Like I said, I believe we were on this path for a reason. Without having gone down this road we would not have met the wonderful people we have, we wouldn’t have gotten to learn as much as we have about the process, we wouldn’t have learned so much about different parts of Russia and our future child’s birth country, we wouldn’t have been able to watch families at our agency bring home their children and most importantly, we wouldn’t be where we are today which is hopefully very close to our child! Rachel, Carey, Laura, Jackie, Kristine and Sinziana – thank you all SO much for listening to my pros/cons, rants/raves, ups/downs the past month. Keith thanks you as well because each night I got home from work, I was a much more pleasant person since I had you all to talk to! :-)

So, Chapter 2 (or is it 10?)… HERE WE GO!