Why Bulgaria?

    Out of all the countries in the world, and all the orphans in those countries, why did we choose Bulgaria?  That's a question that most everyone asks us....  even our social worker as it had to go into our home study report!
    It was a fairly simple process of elimination for us.  Each country has its own regulations for adoption.  Some require one trip to the country, some require two.... some of those trips are required to be up to 6 weeks in length, some countries have required income levels, some have limits on the number of children you can already have in your home, etc.  Because we are a single income family, and because we already have 5 kids in our home, AND because it simply is not feasible for us to be out of the country for more than a week or so at a time (both due to Dan's work schedule and needing to leave our other kids at home) almost all of the countries other than Bulgaria were already marked off the list!!
   We really would have loved adopting a child from Mongolia.  However, with their adoption laws changing with the seasons ( it seems!), it just wasn't going to work out.  We are sponsoring a little boy from the orphanage that I mentioned in a few posts back, and he is SUCH a cutie!!  I feel like he's part of our family... his picture is right there on the fridge with Teodor's!!  :)
   Some families actually start out having been led to adopt from a specific country.  We, however, just felt like we should pursue adoption, and once the ball got rolling, the Lord kept leading us in this direction.  It was confirmed even more as we found out after our application was accepted by our home study agency that they were starting a Bulgaria program themselves.  We had thought that we would have to have different agencies for our home study and our placement of a child.  It has been so nice to work with just one agency.