Good News...and Bad News...

Well, the agency just called me and the good news is that the birth mother finally signed off (she now lives in Mexico and they had to track her down) for the third (fourth?) and final time and in Guatemala's eyes, she is now our baby. This took (much) longer than expected.

The bad news is that Monday is probably NOT my last day of work (we're heading to Whistler to ski with John on Tuesday), as the Guatemalan government has implemented a new pilot program in some smaller locales just the slow down the process. Well, maybe that isn't the intent.....

The City Hall in the town where Kat was born is one of the agencies piloting this program. I don't know exactly what the program entails, nor what they're trying accomplish. The program is allegedly called RANEP, though I couldn't find anything on-line about it at all (if you do, please mail me the links). Anyway, the very first adoption to go through this program took two months to get signed off under RANEP. We are not the first, but are among the first, so they are estimating from two weeks to two months, likely on the shorter side, but who knows.

The Agency said they would ask the lawyer to start translating our file documents now, so that there isn't an additional three weeks for translation AFTER this new step. So we are back to....we don't have a clue when we'll be traveling and when we will bring her home. The remaining steps after this new one, are file translation (about three weeks-hopefully much less), final DNA test (about a week) and then the Embassy appointment scheduled ten-fourteen days from the Embassy's receipt of the hard copy results of the DNA test.

That is the update. No news on when Kat's first plane ride will take place. It looks like we just may be reverting back to a late May to June-ish pickup date.

I will keep you posted.

It still doesn't seem like spring here, though I have cut the grass twice already. And we didn't have snow this weekend, so that's a plus.