Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Our Region

Another new development: We've been assigned a region!!! Lyle & I have been referred to Kyzylorda. This is a verbal confirmation only. We still need to wait for our Letter of Invite and that can take a couple of weeks to a couple of months, but knowing our region is huge!

I know you're wondering where the heck is Kyzylorda?! So were we. Google tells us it's in the Southwestern part of Kazakhstan. It's geography is similar to that of Utah or Nevada and the temperatures range from -11.5 Celsius to +35 Celsius throughout the year. So, if we travel in January, we're going to feel like we're in the tropics if it's a balmy minus 11 degrees! Who needs Miami?

The region has approximately 160,000 residents, so it's not too big but it's also not a little wee village. I think we'll have some of the amenities we've been hoping for. We've been reading some blogs from other families who've adopted from Kyzylorda and that's been very helpful.

Hope to have more details (Letter of Invite) soon.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Checkpoint

Our latest development is an exciting one: Yesterday, we found out that our dossier cleared the Ministries in Astana, Kazakhstan. The next destination is to the particular region from where a child/children matches our application. We signed a couple of Power of Attorney forms that the country needs in order to have local officials act on our behalf on certain issues. So far, we still feel it's likely we'll be traveling early in 2009. That's it for now.