We Passed Court!

The last week has been tough on me. We hadn't received any updates on our baby in a month and our agency kept promising us new pictures of him, but we never got any (and checking my email 100 times a day didn't help any either). We still do not have any new pictures, but we received even bigger news yesterday: Our adoption has been approved in DRC court. This came as quite a surprise since we did not know our case was even ready to go to court and nobody told us we had been assigned a court date. I don't know all the details of how it worked out. All I know is that a process that is estimated to take four months only took one month for us. Even our case worker said this all happened "miraculously fast". It is definitely nice that something happened faster than usual and helps make up for the fact that our home study stretched on for seven months instead of the usual four.

The post- adoption documents are now being translated into English so we can begin our work with the US Embassy. Next week we will begin filling out the I600 immigration paperwork. While we work on that, the process of obtaining a passport for our son starts. After the 5-6 weeks it takes USCIS to approve our I600 paperwork, the Embassy finally begins their 3-6 month long orphan investigation. It does seem backward that the Embassy investigates an orphan's eligibility for adoption at the very last possible stage of the process. You would think that would be the first thing done, but I guess they don't want to invest too much time in a child until a family is working on adopting him.

Anyway, when the Embassy can verify that our baby meets US orphan status, they will issue him an US immigrant visa. Then we can finally fly to Congo and bring him home. We still have some long waits ahead, but we are finally on the last stretch of this process. Right now we are figuring we will bring our son home sometime next winter.



there is no better way to celebrate than with homemade chocolate cake