Monday, November 22, 2010

Where we are at

Our home study is finished and on it's way to get apostilled. Then from there, it will be sent to our adoption agency and they will send it (along with a few other papers) to Ukraine. I will also be mailing out the I600-A this week.

A lot of people have asked how long this adoption should take. We have been told it should take a year, but anyone that knows anything about adoption, knows that can always change. We will just keep our fingers crossed that it won't be any longer than that.

We have also been asked whether we will be getting a girl or a boy. We (Bryson and I) really want a girl, but since age is most important to us, we want the youngest possible, we are willing to be flexible with the sex. To me, it's more important for Bryson to have a sibling, then for me to have a girl.

Last week

There is only 1 week left to help through our Thirty One Gifts adoption fundraiser. Please follow these directions:

-Go to www.mythirtyone.com/bmiller31
-Click on 'Place an Order'
-Click on 'Marie Rushlo'
-Start shopping

Monday, November 8, 2010

Fundraising attempt #1

As most know, the cost of adoption is expensive. With Bryson's adoption we didn't want to ask others for help, but after losing thousands on everything we have been through this year, we decided we needed to do some serious fundraising this time around.

A friend of mine is a consultant for Thirty-One gifts and has been so generous to donate all her commission on anything we sell towards our "adoption fund." Please take the time to browse the site using the directions below. Everything purchased will be credited to our fundraiser.

We have also added a 'Donate' tab on the side for anyone that would like to donate towards our adoption.

Monday, October 25, 2010

The first post

Well folks, here we go again. Are we crazy? Are we doing the right thing? Those are the thoughts going through my mind as we start this new journey to give Bryson a sibling...from Ukraine. You are probably wondering how we got here. Well, it most definitely has not been an easy one.

Earlier this year we had started wondering how we were going to give Bryson a sibling. We had always dreamed of going back to Russia, but just knew we could never afford it again. After much consideration, we decided to try IVF since we had some insurance coverage for it. We then began all the testing and started the IVF cycle at the end of June which carried on to August. Very few even knew we were even doing the IVF because we did a good job of hiding it. We figured less people we told in the beginning, means less people to tell if it didn't work. On Friday August 13, we found out the news that our cycle didn't work. A little over a week later we got a phone call from the daughter of a friend. The daughter's best friend was 5 months pregnant and wanted to give her baby up for adoption. She asked if we were interested. Umm...yes!!! We met her a few hours later and the next morning I called the adoption agency she was already working with. Things progressed over the next month and a 1/2. We slowly started getting excited and had started buying things for our soon to be baby girl due in December. Without going into detail, around the beginning of October, our domestic adoption fell through. We were pretty devastated and had no idea where to go from there. After talking with a friend who mentioned the Ukraine program, we called and talked with an agency regarding it. Then after a few weeks of deciding if this was right for us, we decided to go with it and signed with the agency.