Good news!!

We have a travel date! We leave this coming Monday, April 24th!!

It's been a whirlwind week and it's only half over!! We were walking in the door from our weekend getaway on Monday night (we get Good Friday and Easter Monday off in NL so we went to the Champagne region of France for 4 days) when we received the call from our agency telling us we got our Letter of Invitation (approval) from Kazakhstan. They weren't able to give us our travel date at the time but told us to get our visas. I went to the Embassy in The Hague yesterday and dropped off our applications. The guy told me to call back to check if he could process it. As usual (it seems) there was a problem. We were only approved for a single entry visa and we need a double entry visa as we have to make 2 trips to Kazakhstan for the adoption. After talking with Reaching Out, they've never had this problem before (not what you want to hear) and the Approval being in Russian, we were all at a loss. We decided to get the single entry visa so that we aren't delayed and we'll get a tourist visa for our 2nd trip.

Anyway, back to the GOOD NEWS....we got the call last night that we are to arrive in Almaty on April 25th. From there, we'll fly to Karaganda that same day and go to the orphanage on Wednesday, April 26th. One week from today!!!! If all goes as planned, we'll find our child(ren) and spend 3 weeks with them, 2 visits a day, to get to know them before going to court on May 16th to finalize the adoption. We still aren't sure whether we are adopting 1 or 2 children. We are approved by our social worker and US Immigration to adopt 2 children and really wanted to, but found out last week that the officials in Kazakhstan may not approve the adoption of 2 children at the same time. They've allowed it in the past but as we've seen before, there are new officials in Parliament and they are making changes. Unfortunately, we don't know what the changes are until they affect us so we will wait and see.