The First Blog Entry

Welcome everyone to the first entry in the Sommerhauser family blog. We had a wonderful long weekend in St. Louis visiting family and friends for Thanksgiving and now it is back to work and back to the preparation of our adoption dossier. For those of you who are wondering, the dossier consists of all of the paperwork that must be submitted by us in order to adopt from Kazakhstan. All of the dossier documents must be notarized first and then taken to the Secretary of State's Office where they place an apostille seal on the document which verifies the qualifications of the notary in that county. The paperwork chase is going very well so far and mainly we are waiting to get two documents back from the government: our FBI background clearance letters and our pre-approval form I-171H to adopt internationally from the USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services) division of the Department of Homeland Security.

We hope to have the dossier completed by the middle of December and then the paper journey truely begins. One original of the dossier and four photocopies (over 200 pages in all) will be sent to our adoption agency so all of the paperwork can be translated into Russian. After translation, our agency then sends all of the documents to the Kazakh Consulate in New York City who in turn forward everything to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Astana, Kazakhstan. It can easily take over a month to complete the translation process and the New Years holiday certainly won't speed things up.

Once the Kazakh officials verify that the translated documents are in order then we are merely waiting three or four months for a specific region to determine if a child is available for us to adopt. We are not requesting a specific sex or a specific race of child so our wait time should be pretty typical. We are obtaining USCIS approval for the adoption of up to two children so we are leaving open the possibility of adopting either twins or siblings. Once a region in Kazakhstan has been chosen for us, the government will issue us a letter of invitation for us to travel. Now the process speeds up dramatically as we will then need to quickly apply for visas and make final travel plans because adoptive parents are usually invited to travel less than a month after receiving their letter of invitation.

That is a quick summary of what we are currently working on and what we are expecting throughout this winter. Tomorrow we will share some details about what we should expect during our trip and what the process in Kazakhstan should be like.