When my wife, Jenna, and I decided that we were going to adopt, there were two general agreements that we received from just about everyone we spoke to and all of the friends we'd made on our adoption forums and in our support groups. The first was, that we needed to be prepared for a long and difficult process. A process filled with, as we were well warned, many requirements, confusions, and mistakes. Requirements that had to be met with absolute precision, confusions that would make doing that very difficult, and mistakes from those confusions that would often take great lengths of time to figure out how to correct.

And the second -- they all said that in the end it would be soooo totally worth it.

Honestly it was the 'totally worth it' part that kept us going, because difficult doesn't even begin to describe the process. It's hectic, it's frustrating, and it's insanely confusing. If not for my wife, who I've come to realize is the most organized and level headed person I know -- next to Kevin of course! -- I would have been completely lost. And I probably would have given up after a very short period of time.

There were papers we had to fill out and submit, only to have to resubmit them a few weeks later because they were missing a signature somewhere or our initials somewhere else. Documents had to be filled out and submitted to our agency, to the Ukranian government, and to many other places in between. They needed copies of our birth certificates and copies of our marriage licenses and copies of the copies of those copies... I swear. And did you know you can't just call up and have someone fax those to you? Cause I sure didn't... and nope you can't.

In an age of electronics and technology there are a few things that still have to be done the old fashioned way, using snail mail and lots of paper. Adoption is definetly one of those things. I think they'd probably call in the Pony Express if it still existed.

It's a good thing I'm a Backstreet Boy and I learned that failure is as much a part of success as well... success, or Jenna and I probably would have lost our minds the very first time they called to let us know we needed to resend an entire stack of papers because they'd been 'lost in transit'. LOST... in transit. You know, that kind of stuff doesn't happen with email.

And then there's the part that no one really warned us about. The hardest part so far. The part that happened after we finally got through months and months of paperwork and after we finally got the go ahead to travel to the Ukraine. The point that I thought meant, you know... YAY! I get to fly there, pick up my baby girl and bring her HOME!

Uh... not so fast.

We've been here a week... well, not here where we are right now a week, but in the Ukraine a week... and we haven't even met our daughter yet.

Nope... and it's killing me.

We arrived in Kiev last Monday where we spent the night at a beautiful five star hotel -- one I'd stayed in before with the Backstreet Boys -- and then when we woke up the next morning, we ate a continental breakfast before spending the following hours taking a tour of a small part of the city before our appointment at the ministry building (and yes I thought about Harry Potter when I had to go there), where we finally received our referral for our baby.

It's strange the way it all came about... and I'll tell you more about that later, but when you find a child the way we found our little girl, it's different than when you get matched with a child from an agency at random. In this case, we matched ourselves. We chose her. We saw our daughter and we fell in love and we said, "we want to adopt her"... and even though there is so, so much more to all of it than that... that is the short version.

When we arrived to the ministry offices, we were escorted by a translator to a room where we sat down across a large desk from a man who laid our Dossier on the table before him and started asking questions. Just simple questions... like our names, ages, birthdates. Where we were from and why we were there. Things that were easy enough to answer, even when I was so insanely nervous. It was strange to see our Dossier laying there. I heard my wife take a few deep breaths and I reached over to take her hand. It was, after all, the culmination of months and months worth of effort and paperwork... all of the hours and checking and rechecking to make sure we'd written down everything correctly and signed all the lines and dotted all the i's... and all of the stress... right there before us in an envelope not nearly big enough to signify all the work we'd put into it.

When we'd finally answered all of the questions to the man's satisfaction, he handed us our daughter's file.

The file.

The golden ticket.

The next best thing to actually having her in our arms and one step closer to the real thing. This was all of her personal information... or at least all that they knew.

We couldn't get out of that building fast enough. We literally ran through parts of the city to get back to our hotel, forgoing the dinner we'd planned on stopping to eat so that we could tear into that file and devour whatever information it might contain. When we finally reached our room after what seemed like an eternity, we flung our bags onto the floor and hurried over to the couch, cuddling up together as we placed the file onto the long narrow coffee table in front of us. I looked at Jenna and she looked at me, we both took a deep breath and opened the folder...

... and there she was.

In black and white, in color, in six beautiful new photographs (or at least new to us). There was one of her as a brand new baby... it looked like a hospital picture... it probably was. Another when she was a few months old, one from her first birthday, one that was dated a few months back and one that had been taken only three days before. She looked just as sweet and innocent and beautiful as she had in the photo we'd fallen in love with. The one that had made us decide to adopt her.

We laid the photos down on the table, thankful that we'd have these new keepsakes for her future. Jenna flipped the pages to her medical file... there was information there... mostly what we already knew, some things we didn't, but as we'd been warned in many of our support groups, we weren't ready to trust too much of that information until we got her home to the US to be checked out by doctors we trusted. We flipped next to the section on her 'social' history. There were a few brief paragraphs... but not much useful information. The things we'd known to expect... that she "exhibits some behaviours typical of children in group homes such as rocking...", that she is "slow to warm up to new people" and that she is "often shy and withdrawn". But there were promising words too... "smiles often and laughs"... "loves hugs"... "is easy going." Everything anyone could hope for in any child.

And on the very front of the file... her name.

"Faith."

Very simple. Very sweet. Just... Faith."

The name given to her by the orphanage... and the name we'd decided to keep. Because it was a name far more fitting than any would could have chosen ourselves, and because the moment we saw her and the moment we knew her name, we knew it was meant to be.

Our faith is what brought us to the support groups and the website and her picture... and a huge leap of faith is what we decided to take when we decided to adopt her.

And I just know, in my heart of hearts, as I sit here tonight in this tiny town, just miles away from the orphanage my daughter sleeps in... that it's faith that's going to get us to her... and faith that's going to get us home. Just a few more days...