Sorry it’s been so long since the last update. We’ve had a lot going on lately. Let’s see…where to begin.
Well, last week we got an email from our attorney telling us that some of Kristine’s relatives (an Aunt and Uncle) have come forward and would like to take her to live with them. For international adoptions, I think a notice is published in the paper or something so that family can be notified of adoption proceedings. Kristine’s relatives don’t want to adopt her but instead want to be her guardians. We are not overly concerned that this will stop the process, but it will definitely delay it a couple of weeks. We already know that Kristine doesn’t want to live with these relatives. They have not seen her since she was 3-years old and have not been a part of her life. Kristine has told the children’s home director and the social worker that she already thinks of us as her family.
We have been told that it is unlikely that the court will side with the relatives but you never know. Today, there was a meeting among Kristine, her relatives, the children’s home director and social worker. Kristine once again told them she doesn’t want to go with the relatives. Now it’s up to the children’s home to pass that information to the Orphan Court so that they can rule on it. We are currently awaiting the ruling of the Orphan Court. If the ruling is in our favor (which hopefully it will be), then the Ministry of Adoption will officially “match” us with Kristine and we can move forward and be assigned court dates.
Our original court dates of Oct. 9th and 23rd were assigned to us prematurely, before the international clearance for adoption had been completed. We expect our new court dates to be around the end of October. However, we are waiting until we know for sure before we make our new travel arrangements. The frustrating part of this is that we’ll lose money on the flights and hotel we already booked. We’re trying not to dwell on it though and are just dealing with things as they come up.
Kristine is going through a rough time right now so please keep her and all of us in your prayers. We found out today that she will be moved to another children’s home next week to stay until we get there. I don’t want to get into the details here but I’ll just say the situation at her children’s home became unsafe for her. Because of this, it may be possible that the court will allow us to bring her home to stay with us between court sessions. Another family we know of was able to do this because their child had special circumstances as well. It may turn out to be a good thing because if this happens, we’d have her home for Thanksgiving and Christmas! We won’t know until we’re there for court whether or not they’ll allow us to bring her back. We’ll just have to see how it plays out.
We talked to Kristine a couple of days ago and and asked her if she was okay. It broke our hearts when she said “no”. We could tell she wanted to say more but she hesitated because there were people around listening to her conversation. All we can do is remind her how much we love her and miss her. She always replies, “me too.” It has to be so hard being the child and having all of these adults meeting to discuss your fate. I don’t know how much they tell her about what’s going on. We just want her to know we’re doing everything we can to bring her home.
We found out that when we’re in Latvia for Kristine’s court that we won’t be able to have Olegs stay with us after all. Now that Kristine is staying in a different place and both kids have to go to school each day, the orphan court and director want us to focus on Kristine right now. We can still spend time with Olegs after school each day but he just can’t stay with us. We still don’t know whether it will be possible for Olegs to be cleared for adoption, so we have to be careful not to make it seem like we’re adopting him right now. He knows we want to adopt him but his situation is more complicated. When we get there, we want to make sure he understands exactly what is going on. When we’re in Latvia, we hope to find out more details about the steps they’ve taken so far in getting him cleared for adoption.
It’s been a little bit of an emotional roller coaster lately. We have no doubt that when everything is said and done we’ll be parents. It’s just hard being so far away and depending on others to do their part to make things happen. It just reminds us to rely on our faith. We have to believe that God wouldn’t bring us this far to let us down now.
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