Bill 7496

So my primary contact hadn't heard of the bill but reiterated an expectation that Ukraine will go Hague sooner than later.  The bill doesn't seem to mention "Hague" explicitly but the title to describe what it is preparing for is exactly the same as the Hague convention title.  The Bill and comments seem to make little fanfare about what it is doing.  Oddly the Bill reduced my concern since it paves the way to put in place an intercountry agreement that the US is already party to.  Will just be praying that they can do a nice smooth transition if it happens.

Anyways, we start our second dossier in April with an updated home study.  I noted the I-800a requirements are nearly identical as the I-600a.  In our case our home study agency is Hague accredited and actually does mostly Hague home studies... since California is the only state that we lived in >5yrs ago and they don't do the background checks (some states don't) the main thing we'd have to change is to attend the 8hrs of training.  We are going to talk to them about making sure we do anything extra we can do to make a conversion to a Hague home study be quick.

We also already use an adoption agency on the US side who does adoptions from Hague convention countries... so we should be reasonably ok there.  Basically we are making sure we understand what a conversion means as best as possible to be prepared but not sweating it... the timing and outcome isn't ours anyways.