Introduction

So we are adopting from Kazakhstan. Yes, I said Kazakhstan. It is actually the 9th largest country in the world, and is located in central Asia between China & Russia. If you want to know how to say it, click here. The country has about 15-16 million people who speak Russian and Kazakh. Of course, you could get a lot more detail from Wikipedia or the CIA's fact book, so I won't trouble you with much more details here.
How did we come up with Kazakhstan? Well, once we ended up ruling out domestic because of the long wait, and we thought we could do more good by helping a child in another country. First we looked at the Ukraine because I've got a nice Ukrainian last name, but the laws there were in flux, and they weren't even accepting Americans at the time, so we moved on. We looked at several other countries, but they always seemed to have really strange requirements, or we weren't eligible at all for some reason. Finally we found Kazakhstan where we could adopt a relatively young child (hopefully from 6-12 months old), do it relatively quickly, and it seemed a fairly straightforward process.
In early September 2006, we finally picked an agency, Reaching Out Through International Adoption, and started the process. As I start this blog now at the end of December 06, our paperwork is nearly complete, with the only remaining tasks being getting it all apostilled and submitting it all to the agency. I'm sure we'll put more details out on this later.