Adoption Update IV

It's time for an update, lots has happened!

In the last update, I mentioned that our lawyer decided to contact the US Embassy in La Paz about granting the boys visas before we continued on with the process. We heard back almost two weeks later. I got all nervous opening the email, but great news!! We could continue with the adoption and after living with the boys for two years, apply for US visas.

Then I started working to meet with the lawyer and form our official request for the boys for the court. The first day I was supposed to go downtown, the city was paralyzed due to blockades and strikes. Other days the lawyer had emergency business, or her schedule didn't work with mine. FINALLY we were able to hook up to get all the documents in order and write the memo for court.

Beforehand, we had gone together to talk in court to verify where the boys' cases are located (one seems to be lost right now - not surprising, seeing as how long they've been "in the system") and that we can request the three boys by name. The court secretary said "You can't do that", suggesting that we just ask to adopt three boys ages 9-10, but then went to check with the judge herself and came back shaking her head to say, "She says you CAN do that!" This is the same judge who first asked my staff why I couldn't personally adopt Angel on the same day Jake first wrote me in January last year!

With all of that taken care of, Jake got permission from work for that afternoon and we presented the papers together. There was one more hiccup when the man receiving our paperwork said he could not find us in the system as having begun a judicial request. My guess is that someone made an error entering our foreign names into the system. So we went back up to the court to ask what to do now, and they recalled having seen our case, passed on from SEDEGES. Well good! They said to submit the adoption paperwork as a "new request" and just continue on that way.

Exactly one week later while watching our 4 day old baby sleep, I called the lawyer to check for news. She had found out through the grapevine that the baby had already arrived so she had lots of questions and well wishing first. Then she reported that the court had replied to our request two days prior with the next step, which is asking SEDEGES (like child social services) and Defensoria de la Ninez y Adolescencia (a child rights agency) to make a pronouncement on our request. She had gone in to those two offices the day before to urge them to respond to the court ASAP, and both had said their opinions on our case would be positive. That means everything is moving along well and the court has no observations till this point!

Thanks for praying for God's perfect timing in all of this, and for all of our hearts to be prepared to join together as a family, especially the three boys!