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We have created this site to share our adoption experiences with the adoption community to help those thinking about or going through the adoption process, as well as to keep in touch with our family and friends. Read the short summary below and click on a link to the left to explore.

We have been married for almost 15 years. When we looked into adoption options, we researched adoption in Eastern Europe. We learned about why there are hundreds of thousands of orphans in Eastern Europe. The more we learned, the more comfortable we felt about the idea of adopting a child internationally. In the course of our research phase, we came across a lady on the internet who was helping people adopt from Ukraine independently. We were impressed with her track record of successful adoptions and decided to ask for her assistance.(http://www.ukrainianangels.org/)

In the winter of 2001, we started on our adoption journey by completing the first few steps of the adoption paperwork. 5 years later and 3 trips covering 11 weeks in Ukraine, here we are having completed 4 adoptions with 1 pending in April of 2006. The last 5 years have been amazing. As we finish the last chapters in the adoption journey this year and start our new life with our complete(?) family, we want to help other families who have gone through similar experiences, or are planning to or contemplating international adoption. Adopting children over the age of 10 from Eastern Europe is rare. There are very few case studies. There are very few resources to turn to for help. Hopefully, we can pass on valuable information that will ultimately help the orphans still out there find families willing to adopt them. There also seems to be a curiosity about how will children who have been adopted at such a late stage in their childhood fare? We don't know the final answer to that question as it relates to our children. We do know that they are great kids. And we hope they fare well. And we plan on helping them succeed, and we also plan on having fun and enjoying the task of raising children on a shortened timeline. You are welcome to follow along and observe while we do.

This site is organized around our previous adoption trips and future trips. We have added a blog, which will enable us to create chronological posts along with the ability to have other people post. We have normally helped people by answering questions through email. We will continue to do that, but we may post our answers to questions in the blog so that our experiences can possibly help others with similar questions. To post a comment or reply, you will need to create an account and password on the blog page, but this should create a forum that we can use to better share our experiences along with valuable input from others in the adoption community.

Share our adoption experiences, so that those who visit may be inspired by our story and come away with a better understanding of adoption, especially the adoption of older children, as well as a better understanding of the plight of Eastern European orphans.