Thursday, May 28, 2009

Our Family

I am starting this blog to detail the adoption of our second son. My name is Jacqueline Gray. My husband, Ed, and I have a wonderful son, Collin, age 4. We found out adoption was the best option for becoming parents in 2006. We worked with Graceworks Lutheran Services out of Cincinnati, Ohio and Families Thru International Adoption to adopt Collin from China in October 2006. He has been the joy of our lives. We always planned to have at least 2 children so we started the adoption process again fall 07. After the homestudy we looked at many options. We no longer met China's adoptive parental age requirements so we considered other countries. We started with Vietnam only to find out we would not finish prior to a likely hold on adoptions. We changed to the Kazakhstan program December 2007 and immediately felt drawn to a waiting child on the Children's Hope International list. He was then 25 mos old with a bilateral cleft lip and palate and so sweet! In August 2008 we got devastating news that our entire dossier was sent back asking for a homestudy revision. We looked to change agencies and were told by many not to pursue a Kazakh adoption due to parental age concerns. With heavy hearts we started an Ethiopian adoption with FTIA, thinking maybe Kazakhstan adoption could not happen for us. We were contacted by Susan Collins from Taldy Korgan, Kazakhstan when she was there for her adoption of son Cameron. She remembered our story and told her agency about our past. They agreed to work with us to finish his adoption! We put our Ethiopian adoption on hold and started working on another Kazakhstan dossier. It is now on it's way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Astana, Kazakhstan. Follow along as we hope to bring our son home this year.