When One Door Closes

Well...we have made the decision to withdrawal from the Kazakhstan program. Because of a new ruling that does not allow you to specify the gender of your child (which we did) our paperwork will be returned to the US and then have to go thru the Consulate in DC (notoriously slow) and then the health issues of the children is another concern. We knew that we could be faced with a child that has "minor correctable needs" and this was ok with us. It was not the rule but the exception until now. As many citizens of Kazakhstan are adopting the children they are adopting the healthy children. As a result we may not be able to adopt a healthy child. And while we are open to minor correctable needs we are not prepared to take such a risk that we would not come home with a child at all. We are not prepared for a special needs child and the new gender ruling basically puts us back to square one. While it is possible to move forward even with these circumstances Dusty and I do not feel that at this point we want to continue down that path. With that being said we both feel great peace with our decision and we do feel that there is a child waiting for us but maybe in America. So we will investigate other avenues and keep you posted. For those that are continuing on we wish you the best of luck. We still have great respect for our agency and know that they have done everything to help us along the way. The face of international adoption is changing and we feel like the door to Kaz is closed but another door will open for us soon. We will be shutting down the blog permanently in a couple of weeks. As the intention was to have our blog so that people could check in with us while we were in Kaz. This won't be necessary any longer for us as we are not going international. Thanks to everyone for their support.