Monday, October 18, 2010

waiting for a court date...

so many people have been asking us lately what the next step is for our adoption. sorry i haven't done a great job of conveying that for any of you non-ethiopian adoption folks who might read.


basically, we are now {you guessed it}... WAITING again :) yes, if you haven't caught on by now, adoption is just a seemingly never-ending cycle of waiting. after waiting 3.5 months for our referral, now we are waiting to be assigned 2 court dates in ethiopia. we were told that our case was filed for court a week or so ago and that it would possibly take 3-4 weeks to find out our court dates. when we hear about court, we will be given 2 different dates.

the first court date is referred to as the MOWA {ministry of women's affairs...i believe} court date. we do not have to be present for this court date, but it will be where our little guy's mother will come and relinquish her rights. if all goes well at the first court date, usually around 2 weeks later we will have our second court date. this is the big one! the second court date is the one that ryan and i are now both required to attend. this will be when we will take our first trip to ethiopia to meet our little greer, get to love on him, and hopefully become his legal and official parents! from what we can tell from other families in our agency, we will probably arrive 3-4 days before our second court date and get to spend about 2-3 days visiting with greer in his orphanage. we will not be allowed to take him out of the orphanage at that time so that it is not super confusing for him when we have to leave the country again. we will get a chance to sightsee on the trip, soak up all the ethiopian culture possible, and possibly even meet greer's birth mother at court.

if all goes well and we pass both of our court dates, we will then leave ethiopia and come back home to wait some more. this time, we will be waiting for the ethiopian courts and the US embassy in ethiopia to coordinate their efforts on a passport and visa for our little guy. typically about 6 - 12 weeks later, we'll be back on a plane to ethiopia for our final trip to bring greer home. oh, i can't wait!!!! i get so excited every time i let myself think about going over to finally meet our little guy so just thinking about bringing him home once and for all sends me over the moon!

so, if you're interested in praying for us in this part of the process, here's how you can:
*please just pray for our little guy. pray that he stays healthy and that his heart is prepared to accept us as his forever mommy and daddy. he just turned 11 months old last week so with each passing day, we know that we are missing important milestones and want nothing more than to bring him home. in the meantime though, we want him to be happy, comfortable and well taken care of, which it seems he is, so we want that to continue!
*please pray for us to be assigned a court date SOON! it is our sincere hope that we can take our first trip before the end of 2010. with some recent changing circumstances in our life, this has become even more of a high priority for us. we really want to get word that we'll be going sooner than later to meet him, and to be able to bring him home soon too.
*also, pray for smooth processing of all our paperwork and for us to pass each court date the very first time. this is probably more rare than you would think, so please pray! we know that God is sovereign over all these things, but we still want to ask :)
*finally, pray for ryan and i as we continue to heal from the situation with R & P, and prepare our hearts and our home to parent sweet greer. we are experiencing quite a few unknowns right now with our jobs and some other circumstances, so we are seeking God's direction on all these things so that we can focus our attention on greer when it is time to bring him home.

thanks for praying alongside of us and for being concerned about our journey! we can't wait to see what the next few months have in store for us!!

2 comments:

JT, Natalie, Tedi, & Chernet said...

pLEASE call me if you need anything or need to talk.

lesli said...

thanks, Natalie!