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Have you read any of the other Ukraine boards yet? I suggest you join the Adoption from UKraine board on yahoo and look at the Ukraine thread on FRUA. As it stands right now, if you adopt from UKraine and live in America, you can only adopt children over 10, special needs or siblings of children you have already adopted. It is not clear if these restrictions will be lifted when Ukraine starts accepting dossiers next year. Also, I am not sure if you will be able to adopt with exactly the criteria you want. The adoption center in Kiev is the only organization that can show available children to you. You are shown children that are available the day you have an appointment and you may not find any in your age range. If you are set on children that age, you may be in for a disappointment. You have to be extremely flexible if you want to adopt from Ukraine these days. In addition, no-one knows what things will be like when the new center opens, but they are trying to level the playing field (so to speak) and give equal opportunity to families that use an agency/lawyer and ones that do an independent adoption.

:clap: The SDA is open and processing domestic adoptions. International adoptions for approved dossiers will start September. And at the this time Americans aren't restricted on the age or health issues. Right now (Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec) only approved dossiers are being processed for appointments/adoptions. There are around 1,200 approved dossiers. But some of these families gave up and moved onto other countries. All of the September appointments to receive a referral incountry have been published. The US Embassy in Kyiv stated that 25 Americans got appointments. Some time after Jan 1 2007, the SDA will start taking new dossiers. The US Embassy in Kyiv has asked several times about any restrictions on American citizens. They were told (at the time) that there were none for new dossiers. HOWEVER the sword hanging over everyone's head is the missing post adoption reports. This blog has a copy of the latest email from the US Embassy in Kyiv on this subject. [url]http://ukraine.adoptionblogs.com/weblogs/ukrainian-adoption-appointments-some-num[/url] Last year the NAC (old adoption authority) refused to accept new dossiers from Americans because post adoption reports were missing. They changed their minds and restricted Americans to children 10 or older, siblings of prior adopted child or handicapped. Adoptive families have to provide a report (sort of like a Christmas news letter on the child) to the Ukrainian embassy. And about 10% of American families haven't done the reports. Just one more tidbit.... I am not a lawyer. So take this with a grain of salt. The SDA may not have the legal authority to restriction or refuse dossiers. The NAC didn't have the legal authority for some of its actions last year. I know one person who was refused an appointment/referral in late 2005 because she was single. She did her research, wrote letters to the right folks. It took her a month of letter writing, but she got her appointment and adopted a child.

Angela,I noticed on your blog you mentioned SDAPRC and that registration numbers are posted on the public folder. My husband and I have a registration number (one of the waiting dossiers). I have been looking for the SDAPRC website. Can you tell me how to get to that website? Thanks for the info!

Their web site is [url]http://www.mms.gov.ua/h/children.html[/url] It is in Ukrainian... They still don't have their English version up. I should have been more specific with the word posted. The September list is posted at the SDAPRC... maybe on a door or in a hallway. If you know someone who speaks Russian/Ukrainian, you could probably have them call the SDAPRC for you. They could ask for your appointment date based on your registration number. The October appointment list was suppose to be out last week, but isn't. And I have heard that November and December appointment lists are posted/available at the SDAPRC too.

A poster named two_roses over on FRUA's board suggested using [url]http://www.trident.com.ua/[/url] to translate the SDAPRC's web site. It seems to work better then the Ukrainian translator site that I was using. Hopefully we will hear about the October appointments starting on Friday. Rumor is that SDA will post the appointments at the beginning of September. I only saw this in one place (FRUA's board). But it makes sense based on some past SDA statements.