Where is Kazakstan?

Ice Blocks!!

Nate and Justin are riding ice blocks down the hill at Arroyo Verde Park the day of the baby shower!

Fun! Then Moorea joined in. As you can see, Roni watches as Moorea rides down the hill!
Uncle Brian and Jonny had a pretty good ride, too.

Baby Shower at Arroyo Verde Park

The BBQ/baby shower at Arroyo Verde Park was really fun. Luckily, Ireland waited to be born the next week! It was fun to have a baby shower for Ireland and a toddler shower for Maks on the same day. Boy, was it alot of work. I'm sure Auntie Elizabeth would agree. :)

Thanks to everyone for coming and celebrating with us. It was great to see all of you.

About our adoption process

We are Jason and Melissa Woods. We decided to adopt a child from Kazakhstan so that we could be parents and a child could have a forever family. We signed with Adoption International Program after some research.

In Kazakhstan, referrals (the child that you want to adopt) are not official until you meet the child, spend 2 weeks bonding, then go to court to ask to adopt that child. The judge usually assigns a 2 week waiting period after the court date for the adoption to become final. Then you travel to Almaty where there is a US Embassy and you obtain the paperwork to bring the child home. Sounds straight forward, but the whole trip takes roughly 8 weeks! Sometimes, parents make two trips. We are not exactly sure if we will take one or two trips.

We started the process in January of 2005. (see timeline post) We have had some paperwork delays so things aren't going according to plan! We continue to hope and pray that it will all work out in the end.

Thanks for reading. We will continue this blog along our journey in order to keep you posted on what's going on. If you would like to leave us comments, please do. We love to read them. Which reminds me - sometimes strange comments get through. I am working on deleting them!

Keep us in your thoughts!