What my kids asked for

Okay, so my kids thought I should write about how we adopted each of them so I'm going to start off with how we came about in moving forward with Dania. We knew we wanted to adopt again. We were thinking of an older child around 10,11 or 12. We knew we didn't want to pay an agency for doing the work that we knew we could do ourselves and have done ourselves. After checking all the countries that let you do independent adoptions (not many) and searching out blogs of people who were going through the process we decided on Ukraine. The SDA (State Department for Adoption) shows files of available children in different regions of the country. The stay in country can be very long while waiting for your court date but we went ahead with it anyway. Once we paid to have our home study done, ran around getting all our paperwork and fingerprints done and everything in between to complete our dossier, Ken and Roc flew to Ukraine in April 2008 to have everything translated. They then proceeded to go the the SDA . They went to hand in our dossier and the ladies working there looked at him like he was crazy!!!! They didn't know what to think. No one ever does this. They always hire a facilitator to do this work. They even let him talk to the director. He was told to come back in two days. Outside he talked with several facilitators working for other families and got a lot of advice for them. They said that it would be better for him to hire a facilitator because they know where everything is once the "running" starts to get all the paper work for court. They would be your translator, guide, and get things done quicker than he could. Oh if only they knew what we went through with our first two adoptions in Romania!!!! So Ken and Roc went back in two days only to find out that they would not accept it but that they should fly home and call in two weeks to see if they could in fact do this himself. After a couple more tries at the SDA, they flew home and in two weeks we called and of course the answer was no. Once home we kept searching the blogs and found out a lot of families were coming home with no kids for one reason or another. This is when Ken decided Ukraine was not for us. Mostly because he knew I would NOT turn a referral down, no matter what condition the child was in! I think knowing me so well when it comes to orphans made him just a wee bit nervous. While wondering where we should go from here I found a little 11 yr old girl. Called about her and found out she was from Colombia South America. That story to come in another post, but she is our daughter now. Which brings us here. I kept reading those blogs of families going and coming home from Ukraine and Russia and other Eastern Europe Countries. When a little 4 yr old gypsy girl(I know its probably more politically correct to call them Roma but we have two gypsies living with us and they refer to themselves as gypsies) showed up on Reese's Rainbow looking for her forever family, we ALL knew she was meant to be ours. You see, we started out adopting a 4yr old gypsy cutie from Eastern Europe and we only find it fitting to adopt our last child the same way! Here we go again!!!!