Thursday, August 30, 2012

Approved! With the documents to prove it...

Well, I've been holding off posting on our blog until I had some sort of news to share, and now I do! We were officially approved to adopt Jonathan by the Lubumbashi courts! We are finally in our last 30 day wait. After those 30 days, he will officially and irrevocably be ours! We are so ecstatic. It all seems so much more real and possible now.

We actually heard in early August that our case had been approved and signed off on in the courts, but we could not get our official typed and sealed documents until this past weekend. I'm not sure of the dates on the document as we haven't seen a copy yet, but sometime around August 25th, we officially became a family, even with an ocean between us.

So now what? Well, we have 4-6 weeks of document collecting to wait through now. New birth certificate, possibly corrected court documents (we haven't heard of anything yet, but, in general, there are at least a few errors that have to be corrected on court paperwork), and other post-judgement documents that will complete the Congolese portion of our adoption.

After those are collected and our Certificate of Non-Appeal is issued, Jonathan will be moved to the agency transition house in Kinshasa. This will be a very exciting step as it means that we are in the final stretch of our process and it also means very frequent updates on Jonathan. As the transition home is run by our agency, I can be sure he'll receive our care packages and I should often receive health and personality updates. We expect he will be in the transition home for 6-8 weeks, after which we are able to pick him up!

I never thought we would be looking at November as a pick-up time frame (my worst case scenario time frame was always October), but I don't see any possible way that we could make it any earlier than mid-November. Fingers crossed that the remaining documents needed come through much more efficiently than our other court documents.

So, like most every other step in the adoption process, we wait. And Jonathan waits (though he probably has no clue who or what he's waiting on). To celebrate our court news, Adam and I are painting and re-decorating the kids' rooms for Jonathan's impending arrival. I've been waiting on this step, but I feel like we can now confidently say we'll be a family of five very soon!

2 comments:

  1. yay! I am so happy to read this! So exciting things are coming to an end shortly. I know you're ready to get your guy to the transition house! Have fun painting!

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  2. How exciting! It is inspiring to read other's stories in the midst of waiting ourselves!

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