The Good News and the Bad News

I'm not sure which you'd want to hear first -- the good news or the bad news.
I suppose I should just start chronologically. We saw an announcement on the State Department website Thursday morning that said that adoptions with Guatemala will be suspended as soon as the US becomes Hague Accredited.

[The Hague Treaty is basically an agreement that states that all who are involved agree that there are rules we'll follow with our intercountry adoptions. The problem is that Guatemala is part of the agreement and they are non-compliant as they still do not have a central governing body and governing laws that regulate the adoption process in that country. Once the US signs the treaty they will no longer be able to coordinate adoptions with Guatemala because politically the treaty is trying to enforce that all countries follow certain guidelines. We do not want to turn a blind eye to countries who have not followed procedure].

I was thrown into a panic. We spent the next 36 hours trying to get in touch with our agency contacts at both our homestudy agency and international adoption agency. We have since found out that as long as we have Immigration Approval (IA) by December 2007, we'll still be able to complete the adoption. We SHOULD have IA by August, as our paperwork is already there or on its way to the IA office in Fairfax.
That's the good news.

The bad news is that Ray and I -- me, mostly -- have really been hoping the boys would be here close to Christmas. Our Agency said that at this point, she feels sure we'll not have the boys until the beginning of 2008. Ray reminds that we were hoping for the best-case scenario all along, and that the way some things have gone recently, we jumped track from "best-case scenario."

In sum, we've just had a hard time with some screw-ups with our fingerprinting processes and our homestudy agency has been far too lackadaisical. They'll tell us everything's about done. Then a few days later they'll send a mysterious email saying, "Did you send in that form?" We'll spend two days trying to figure out what they meant by "that form." Then they'll repeat that they're almost done. And a week later they'll tell us there's something we were supposed to have done, but they never mentioned it to us. It's been very aggravating.

Ray says that we've done what we could do and there's just a big part of the adoption that is not in our hands. It's hard feeling like you can't control something, when others aren't moving like you want them to. I suppose this too is part of the lesson we're learning in this process. We're trusting God -- and learning everyday a bit more of what that entails and requires of us. It's humbling, for sure. But the one thing I feel more certain of than anything is that God is good and his plans are good - so we just need to rest in that, no matter where it takes us, or the boys.