Let the games begin!!!

What games? Why, the Olympic games for one thing. Russia just won the bid for the 2014 winter Olympics.

But that wouldn't be enough to write a blog entry about. Instead, I have great news -- yesterday, on the 4th of July, seven American adoption agencies were given their reaccreditation by Russia!!! Ours was not among them (there are around 40 still waiting) but this is a huge turn in the tide. No agency had been reaccredited since April 2006. This is a symbol of a giant breakthrough: Russia has demonstrated that it is going to continue with its system of accredited agencies being allowed to facilitate adoptions (which at times people had begun to doubt). Our agency "hopes to be" in the second batch of reaccreditations (who doesn't?), and we aren't sure when they would be. However, last time Russia did reaccreditations the first two "batches" were only about 3 weeks apart. So it may not be long. But who knows?

What does this mean for us? Well, the timing is interesting. It is still another month or so before we are able turn in paperwork to switch regions. If our agency is reaccredited before that, we plan to stay with our original region. If not, we will prepare our documents for the new one and send them in mid-August. In either case, we very much hope that we will be traveling in September or October!

Fun fact: Our original region is in Siberia, and would require a plane trip from Moscow. Our potential new region is just a 3-hour drive from Moscow. While sort of attached to the old one, one nice thing about the new one was that we could at least save money from not needing those flights. Then we learned that in the new region, there is an extra doctor's visit required in Russia. Each of us would need to go to a special clinic where they do these exams (most people say they're quite brief) and it would set us back $700 PER PERSON!! Scandalous!