Introduction

Today, I am excited and hopeful about our adoption plans. It actually feels like it is going to happen, so I thought I would take the momentous step of starting a blog to chronicle the process from the very beginning.

This afternoon I plan to send out our self-study to the organization that will do our home study. The self-study is a bit of a challenge and we have been working on it for a while. There are lots of questions about every aspect of our lives. They literally want to know everything beginning with our first memories (mine is sitting on Grandma Reinoehl's kitchen table getting my hair done, by the way). It is difficult to answer all of these quesions, but at the same time it has given us the opportunity to inventory our lives so to speak. I feel a sense of satisfaction looking at who we are and what we have accomplished and how we got to this point.

Of course this is just the beginning of the paperwork. There are lots of forms - forms that prove we have a house and a job and are alive. We will compile a dossier of all of these forms which can be 300 pages long! I guess it will be a paperwork pregnancy. If all goes well, we hope to travel to Kazakhstan next summer.

But I am getting ahead of myself! I intended for this to be an introduction. Scott and I met about 18 years ago - could it be that long ago?! - while we were a Indiana University. We married in 1995. Both of us teach at Southern Illinois University. I am in the School of Art & Design and Scott is in Political Science. In 2003, our son Luca was born. We absolutely love taking care of Luca and watching him grow and flourish. Becoming parents is the best thing that ever happened to us. In February of 2005, we found out we were pregnant with triplets. But, tragically, Hope, Meret and Annalisa were born prematurely at 22 weeks.

Since we lost our baby girls we have been thinking about adoption. We chose Kazakhstan because it seems the orphans there are very well taken care of. The program also seems very stable. We are requesting a girl as young as possible. More than likely she will be Kazakh, which is generally a mix of Asian and European. Here is a link to a page that outlines the process: http://www.worldpartnersadoption.org/kazakhstan.html.