Friday, November 23, 2007

Off to Russia

Okay, let me catch everyone up on what has been going on with the adoption process...
We originally received our CIS approval on October 20. However, there was a problem. The documentation (I-797) only indicated we were adopting two children when in fact, we are adopting three children. We contacted them and were told we only needed to send a letter requesting the change. I overnighted a letter on October 23. Well, after many e-mails in follow-up and one more letter, we received our corrected 797 today!

CIS notified us by e-mail, on November 20th, that the corrected 797 was processed. We notified the agency that afternoon and Wednesday morning they called and asked if we could leave for Russia on November 30. I was not expecting to travel for another 2-3 weeks! I contacted a travel agent and ordered the airline tickets which have us leaving out of Birmingham on 11/30. We are flying east and entering Russia via Moscow as opposed to flying west and entering in our region (shorter flight). We will be in the air approximately 20 hours. With my claustrophobia, that is 17.5 hours longer than I am comfortable with.