Progress!

Well, since our last blog, we've had some major setbacks and some major progress. I was too blah to blog after the setbacks, and too cautious  and/or superstitious to blog about our progress. Basically, this is how it's happened over the last two months - we got all of our paperwork and prepared to file our I600 (mid-November), and then we found out that Jonathan's birth certificate had a different date than the rest of our adoption paperwork (January 6th, 2010 versus the original birth date we received, January 6th, 2009). Originally, our agency thought it was a typo, but after contacting our lawyer, they found a birth judgment dating back to the month directly after our referral that also had that date, so it was now a matter of figuring out which date was correct and how to correct the documents accordingly. I think this was a pretty rare occurrence for our agency, so there was some lag in figuring out how to move forward.

To add to the complexity of the issue, Adam and I had always thought Jonathan was younger than his given age. He is extremely small, though that can be due to malnutrition or just environmental factors, and he just looks less mature than the almost-four we thought him to be in many of his photos. That being said, our agency confirmed with the lawyer and birth mother the 2009, so we moved forward with that date on our paperwork (I don't think we'll know his actual age, for sure, until I am able to take him to US doctors and dentists for their opinion, but that's okay). Last week, we finally got the corrected birth certificate, so, paperwork wise, I think we are finally done.

While waiting for the corrected paperwork, Adam and I made the decision to go ahead and file our I600 application with the paperwork we had. We received information the day after Christmas that we needed additional paperwork (not relating to the birth certificate), and that was sent in last week as well. We hope to have our I600 approval sometime this week.

Once we get our approval, we can make our Embassy appointment (the last appointment made from our agency was for January 18th - hoping for a date around there). After Embassy, we expect a 2-3 week wait before we travel. If everything goes perfectly (and that has not been the theme of our adoption to this point :) we should travel February 3rd or February 10th.

And while it's been really tough with the holidays and with Jonathan's (3rd or 4th) birthday coming up, we have been so lucky to receive lots of pictures and updates of our little man over the last few weeks. Lots of agency families are traveling and they've been kind enough to post photos of our little guy. He seems to be doing mostly well... a little bit of respiratory issues (the air in Kinshasa is very bad, so this is not surprising) and a little bit of distended belly. Minor issues that will respond well to the cleaner air and better diet he'll have when he gets home.

Keeping our fingers crossed that these last few steps go off without a hitch... we're coming for you soon!